Lesson 2: The Economy of Nature

What type of science is ecology 

Quantitative science 

What is convection? What is conduction?

Movement through fluid (liquid or gas). COnduction is heat transfer through direct contact in solids

Explain the energy balance of a lizard

Inputs from solar radiation, ingestion, conduction, and convection

Outputs through convection, conuction, evaporative, excretion

What does the balance of inputs and outputs determine? What are the balanced governed by?

Balance determines temperature, metabolism, and growth of an organism.

Balance is governed by second law of thermodynamics

What are the inputs and outputs of nitrogen mass balance of a forest watershed

Inputs are nitrogen fixation, nitrogen deposition, nitrogen mineralizaition

Outputs are: plant uptake storage in soil orgaic matter, nitrogen volatilization, leaching, stream discharge

The balance of these inputs and outputs determines whether a forest is nitrogen limited or nitrogen saturadted

What do histograms show? What does a histogram look like

Shows data such that the height or area or a bar in each class interval is proportional to the relative frequency of data in this interval

In plotting histograms, one starts by diving the range of all values into bins so that each piece of data is in a class interval

What is standard deviation

The measure of the amount of variaiton or dispersion in a set of values

What do power distributions show

Few observations are very common, most are rare

What is rank abundance

Relative abundance vs. ranking of species from most to least common 

so x is rank abundane and y is relative abundance 

What is the poisson distribution? What is it useful for 

Is discrete probability distribution that expresses the probability of a given number of events occuring in a fixed interval of time if these events occur with a known constant mean rate and independently of the time since the alst event 

ex. number of raindrops that fall in a given area in a given time 

useful for analyzing flood occurences because ti deals with events happening randombly and independently over time 

Why is it hard to understand the envrionment

Bc the envrionment is variable. Genetic variability is the raw material of evolution

What is the difference between median and mean

Median is the sum of all observations/# of observations

Median: 50 percentile observation, literally 50% are above and below

Bosx and whisker plots

The whiskers show the min and maximum

The interquartile range shows the laower Q1, the median, and upper quartile Q3

What is a spurious correlation

When it seems like there is correlation between two non indepndent variables, where a lukring vairbale is the cause.

Correlation is not always causation

What is reductionism

Understanding a complex system by breaking it down to its fundemental parts