AP Environmental Science Unit 2

  • Genetic diversity - measure of the genetic variation among individuals in a population

  • Species diversity - indicates the number of species in a region or a particular ecosystem

  • Habitat diversity - The variety of habitats in an ecosystem

  • Specialists - Species that only live under a narrow range of biotic or abiotic conditions

  • Generalists - Species that can live under a wide range of abiotic or biotic conditions

  • Species richness - The number of different species in a given area

  • Species evenness - The relative proportion of individuals within the different species in a given area

  • Provisionional services - Goods produced by ecosystems that humans can use directly

  • Regulating services - Natural ecosystems help to regulate envionmental conditions

  • Supporting systems - Support services that would be extremely costly for humans to generate

  • Cultural services - Cultural or aesthetic benefits to people

  • Island biogeography - The study of how species are distributed and interacting on islands

  • Species-area curve - How species on an island increase with the area of the island

  • Ecological tolerance/fundamental niche - The suite of abiotic conditions under which a species can survive

  • Realized niche - The range or abiotic and biotic conditions under which a species actually lives

  • Geographic range - 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

  • Resistance - A measure of how much a disruption can affect the flows of energy and matter

  • Resilience - The rate at which an ecosystem returns to its original state

  • Immediate disturbance hypothesis - The hypothesis that ecosystems experiencing intermediate levels of disturbance will favor a higher level of diversity of species than those with high or low disturbance levels

  • Microevolution - At the population level

  • Macroevolution - Gives rise to new species, genera, families, classes, phyla

  • Evolution by artificial selection - The process in which humans determine which individuals to breed, typically with a preconceived set of traits in mind

  • Evolution by natural selection - The process by which the environment determines which individuals survive and reproduce

  • Fitness - An individual’s ability to survive and reproduce

  • Adaptation - A trait that improves an individual’s fitness

  • Geneflow - Individuals move from one population to another and alter the genetic composition of both

  • Genetic Drive - Change in the genetic composition of a population over time as a result of random mating

  • Bottleneck effect - A population experiences a drastic reduction in genetic diversity when the size of a population is reduced

  • Allopatric speciation - The process of speciation that occurs with geographic isolation

  • Sympatric Speciation -  The evolution of one species into two without geographic isolation

  • Genetically modified organism(GMO)- An organism produced by copying genes from a species with some desirable trait and inserting them into other species

  • Ecological succession - The predictable replacement of one group of species by another over time

  • Primary succession - When succession begins with bare rock and no soil

  • Pioneer species - Organisms that can survive with little to no soil

  • Secondary succession - Areas that have been disturbed but have not lost their soil

  • Climax community - Historically described as the final stage of succession

  • Keystone species - A species that isn’t very abundant but has large effects on an ecological community

  • Indicator species - Used to quickly characterize when ecosystems have been negatively impacted by humans