Module 11: Ecological Tolerance and Environmental Change

Practice flashcards for Module 11, covering ecological tolerance, ecological niches, mass extinctions, and methods for understanding past environmental changes.

Ecological Tolerance

The suite of abiotic conditions under which a species can survive, grow, and reproduce. Also known as fundamental niche.

Fundamental Niche

The range of abiotic conditions under which a species can potentially persist, before considering biotic interactions.

Realized Niche

The range of abiotic and biotic conditions under which a species actually lives, often narrower than its fundamental niche due to biotic factors.

Geographic Range

The areas of the world in which a species lives.

Mass Extinction

A large number of species that went extinct over a relatively short period of time.

Sixth Mass Extinction

The current global mass extinction event, widely agreed by scientists to be primarily caused by human activities such as habitat destruction, overharvesting, invasive species, climate change, and emerging diseases.

Carbon Dating

A process that examines how radioactive carbon-14 isotopes change over thousands of years, used to measure ages of sediment layers and determine past plant distributions from pollen records.