Unit 2 Vocab Flashcards
The action or process of adapting or being adapted.
Adaption
Refers to a characteristic or feature of an organism that enhances its survival or reproductive success in a particular environment.
Adaptive Trait
Of, relating to, or resulting from the influence of human beings on nature.
Anthropogenic
The variety of life in the world or in a particular habitat or ecosystem.
Biodiversity
The nonmaterial benefits that humans obtain from ecosystems through spiritual enrichment and educational, recreational and aesthetic experiences.
Cultural Service
Disturbance or problems which interrupt an event, activity, or process.
Disruption
The interruption of a settled and peaceful condition.
Disturbance
A _______________ is a method of measuring how many different types there are in a dataset. Some more sophisticated indices also account for the phylogenetic relatedness among the types.
Diversity Index
A biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment.
Ecosystem
___________________ are the various benefits that humans derive from healthy ecosystems. These ecosystems, when functioning well, offer such things as provision of food, natural pollination of crops, clean air and water, decomposition of wastes, or flood control.
Ecosystem Services
Factors in a person’s surroundings or environment that cause emotional or mental strain in their lives.
Environmental Stress
Containing or consisting of a series of loosely connected parts or events.
Episodic
A process that results in changes in the genetic material of a population over time.
Evolution
A person competent in several different fields or activities.
Generalist
__________________ is the total number of genetic characteristics in the genetic makeup of a species. It ranges widely, from the number of species to differences within species, and can be correlated to the span of survival for a species.
Genetic Diversity
Explores the variations in ecosystems within a specific geographic area. In general, the variety of distinct habitats found in an ecosystem or biome is referred to as _____________________.
Habitat Diversity
____________________ are defined as species which can provide information on ecological changes and give early warning signals regarding ecosystem processes in site-specific conditions due to their sensitive reactions to them.
Indicator Species
______________________ is a field within biogeography that examines the factors that affect the species richness and diversification of isolated natural communities. The theory was originally developed to explain the pattern of the species–area relationship occurring in oceanic islands.
Island Biogeography
A species on which other species in an ecosystem largely depend, such that if it were removed the ecosystem would change drastically.
Keystone Species
A ______________ is a variable of a system that causes a noticeable change in output or another measure of a type of system.
Limiting Factor
Seasonal movement of animals from one region to another.
Migration
The process whereby organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring. The theory of its action was first fully expounded by Charles Darwin and is now believed to be the main process that brings about evolution.
Natural Selection
Appearing or occurring at intervals.
Periodic
___________________ are resilient species that are the first to colonize barren environments, or to repopulate disrupted biodiverse steady-state ecosystems as part of ecological succession.
Pioneer Species
A __________________ or genetic bottleneck is a sharp reduction in the size of a population due to environmental events such as famines, earthquakes, floods, fires, disease, and droughts; or human activities such as genocide, speciocide, widespread violence or intentional culling.
Population Bottleneck
______________________ is the beginning step of ecological succession where species known as pioneer species colonize an uninhabited site, which usually occurs in an environment devoid of vegetation and other organisms.
Primary Succession
Any type of benefit to people that can be extracted from nature.
Provisioning Service
Ecosystem services are the various benefits that humans derive from healthy ecosystems. These ecosystems, when functioning well, offer such things as provision of food, natural pollination of crops, clean air and water, decomposition of wastes, or flood control.
Regulating Service
The capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
Resilience
The refusal to accept or comply with something; the attempt to prevent something by action or argument.
Resistance
______________________ is the secondary ecological succession of a plant’s life.
Secondary Succession
A person who concentrates primarily on a particular subject or activity; a person highly skilled in a specific and restricted field.
Specialist
________________ is the number of different species that are represented in a given community. The effective number of species refers to the number of equally abundant species needed to obtain the same mean proportional species abundance as that observed in the dataset of interest.
Species Diversity
_____________ describes the commonness or rarity of a species; it requires knowing the abundance of each species relative to those of the other species within the community. Abundance values can be difficult to obtain.
Species Evenness
____________________ is the number of different species represented in an ecological community, landscape or region.
Species Richness
Services that maintain fundamental ecosystem processes, such as habitat for plants and wildlife, or the maintenance of genetic and biological diversity.
Supporting Service
The ability or willingness to tolerate something, in particular the existence of opinions or behavior that one does not necessarily agree with.
Tolerance
