Environmental Ethics, Matter, Energy, and Ecosystems

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering environmental ethics, matter, types of energy, ecological organization, trophic levels, and food chains/webs.

Environmental Ethics

A discipline in philosophy that studies or focuses on the moral relationship among human beings to the value and moral status of the environment, which includes plants and animals.

Ethics

The branch of philosophy that systematizes, defends, recommends, and identifies what is right and wrong behavior.

Inherent Value

An intrinsic right to exist.

Instrumental Value

A value attributed to things because they are useful to someone who matters.

Matter

Anything that can occupy space and has a mass.

The Six States of Matter

The six physical forms matter can take: solid, liquid, gas, plasma, Bose-Einstein condensate, and fermionic condensate.

Phase Changes

Transitions between states of matter, including melting and freezing (solid to liquid), evaporation and condensation (liquid to gas), and sublimation and deposition (solid to gas).

Energy

A property that provides the force to hold matter together, tear it apart, and move from one place to another.

Kinetic Energy

The energy possessed by a body because of its motion.

Potential Energy

The energy possessed by a body by virtue of its position or configuration.

Gravitational Potential Energy

Energy due to the position of an object relative to the Earth’s ground.

Elastic Potential Energy

Energy due to configuration that is common in elastic materials such as springs.

Electrical Potential Energy

The energy that is needed to move a charge against an electric field.

Chemical Potential Energy

The energy stored in the chemical bonds of a substance.

Organism

Living things that are capable of reacting to stimuli, reproduction, growth, and homeostasis.

Population

Consists of all the members of a species living in each area at the same time.

Species

Refers to all organisms of the same kind that are genetically similar enough to breed in nature and produce offspring.

Biological Community

The population of organisms living and interacting in a particular area.

Ecosystem

An ecological level composed of a biological community and its physical environment.

Biome

A major ecological community of organisms adapted to a particular climatic or environmental condition on a large geographic area in which they occur.

Biosphere

A global ecosystem composed of living organisms (biotic) and the nonliving factors (abiotic) from which they derive energy and nutrients.

Lithosphere

The solid earth component of the planetary system.

Atmosphere

The layer of gases (the air) surrounding the Earth.

Hydrosphere

All the water present across the planet.

Earth's Environmental Spheres

The interconnected global systems composed of the lithosphere (solid earth), atmosphere (gases/air), hydrosphere (all water), and biosphere (all life).

Trophic Level

The storage steps along a food chain or food web, organized by a who-eats-who system.

10% Energy Transfer Rule

The ecological principle that only about $10\%$ of a trophic level's absorbed energy is absorbed by the next level, while the vast majority is lost as heat to the environment via cellular respiration.

Decomposers (Detritivores)

Organisms that live off of detritus by decomposing waste and dead matter from the other trophic levels.

Food Chain

A simple, linear series of steps showing the transfer of energy within an ecosystem when one organism eats another.

Food Web

A complex, interconnected network of feeding relationships and energy flow among organisms within an ecosystem.