Environmental Science #2
Terms
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- Ecosystem
- All organisms and nonliving entities
- Eutrophic
- Term describing a water body that has high-nutrient and low-oxygen conditions.
- Environmental Resistance
- The collective force of limiting factors, which together stabilize a population size at its carrying capacity.
- Community
- An assemblage of populations of organisms that live in the same place at the same time.
- Density-dependent Factor
- A limiting factor whose effects on a population increase or decrease depending on the population density.
- Density-independent Factor
- A limiting factor whose effects on a population are constant regardless of the population density.
- Alfred Russell Wallace
- English naturalist who proposed, independently of Charles Darwin, the concept of natural selection as a mechanism for evolution and as a way to explain the great variety of living things
- EPA
- (Environmental Protection Agency) An administrative agency created by executive order in 1970. The EPA is charged with conducting and evaluating research, monitoring environmental quality, setting standards, enforcing those standards, assisting the states in meeting standards and goals, and educating the public.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- American author, poet, and philosopher who espoused transcendentalism, a philosophy that views nature as a direct manifestation of the divine, and who promoted a holistic view of nature among the public.
- Trophic Cascade
- A series of changes in the population sizes of organisms at different trophic levels in a food chain, occurring when predators at high trophic levels indirectly promote populations of organisms at low trophic levels by keeping species at intermediate trophic levels in check. Trophic cascades may become apparent when a top predator is eliminated from a system.
- Ecological Footprint
- The cumulative amount of land and water required to provide the raw material a person or population consumes and to dispose of or recycle the waste that is produced.
- Ecocentrism
- A philosophy that considers actions in terms of their damage or benefit to the integrity of whole ecological systems, including both biotic and abiotic elements. The belief that the well-being of an individual organism is less important than the long-term well-being of a larger integrated ecological system.
- Competitive Exclusion
- An outcome of interspecific competition in which one species excludes another species from resource use entirely.
- Conservation Ethic
- An ethic holding that humans should put natural resources to use but also have a responsibility to manage them wisely.
- Walt Whitman
- American poet who espoused transcendentalism.
- Ecology
- The science that deals with the distribution and abundance of organisms, the interaction between organisms and their abiotic environments.