Vocabulary

• Biosphere: Combination of all ecosystems of the planet, fancy way of saying Earth

• Biome: Regions of the world characterized by similar plants and animals, and a similar climate. They share similar temperatures, water types, sunlight levels, and soil compositions. This is what determines what kind of life lives there to begin with. Refers to the land itself not the life. They are large areas

• Biota: The sum of all living things, which is influenced by physiographic features. The life in a given biome

• Physiographic features: Climate, soil, geography

• Ecotone: The boundary between two different biomes, the transition zone

• Climate: A region’s long term atmospheric conditions, influenced by the tilt of Earth’s axis (which causes the seasons). Climate influences the movement of air and water circulation. Overall weather and conditions, over hundreds and thousands of years. Climate doesn’t change from day to day

• Coriolis effect: Describes the tangential velocity at the equation being greater than at the poles. This gives objects travelling away from the equator greater velocity than the Earth underneath

• Topography: Describes elevation, being higher up makes it colder and less diverse

• Soil: A mixture of living and non-living organisms, easily classifiable based on vertical layerings (horizons), constantly changing

• Lake: Formed by natural mechanisms like volcanism (where it errupted and surrounding areas from impacts), but mostly glacial activity. Humans have created false lakes by damming rivers.

• Lentic system: Water that is still standing, and now flowing

• Epilimnion: Lots of sunlight, lots of bacterial activity with plants and lots of life, top horizontally in a lake.

• Metalimnion: Some sunlight but not much, cooler, middle horizontally

• Hypolimnion: Deep parts of the lake, little sunlight or oxygen, bottom horizontally

• Littoral zone: Along the shoreline

• Limnetic zone: Open water

• Thermocline: A layer of water that divides temperature fluctuation in large bodies of water, can be a gradient typically but graphically represented by a line. Causes thermal stratification to segment the lake based on temperature

• Oligotrophic: A lake full of live with lots of oxygen

• Eutrophic: An oxygen depleted lake with not a lot of life

• Lotic: Flowing water, like a stream or river

• Floodplain: Where a river will fill to when it floods or heavily rains

• Riparian zone: The zone around a river that has plants and animals associated with water living.

• Water column: The actual water in a river horizontally

• Benthic zone: Right under a river, where water meets the land horizontally where there is the most life

• Hyporheic zone: Has groundwater and soil that holds up the river, horizontally

• Phreatic Zone: Under the hyporheic zone, bedrock which holds up the entire river system

• River continuum: Lotic systems process change in a downstream direction, and the structure of the biological community is predictable based on their positions with the stream. “This is a first order stream, and therefore probably has forest around it because it comes from a higher elevation. As the stream order increases, there are smaller plants and larger animals.” This can tell someone the types of animals, depth/temperature/velocity of the water and other factors, based solely on knowing the order.

• Intertidal zone: Shoreline of the ocean, it’s littoral zone

Air on the equator is heated up due to the sun’s heat, and this air rises and brings water with it, but then it cools and condenses, falling and creating a tropical rainforest. This happens at the equator. By the time the air is 30 degrees North or South, the air is dry but still hot, creating deserts. The movement of air occurs because of the centrifugal force of Earth rotating. The same thing happens with the water in the oceans. These two feed into each other.

Global warming melts glaciers, which are freshwater, and turns the water less salty and less dense, which will warm itself easier, and feed back into the cycle of melting even more glaciers. Due to the location of Greenland and it melting, it will cut off the water current loop, and if that is cut off, Europe will get colder because there isn’t anything dragging warm water over.

Over the past couple years, plant life has changed a lot more on land that has been directly used by humans. We cause global warming, we are the problem.

Soil is created by parent materials. These include Earthy materials (mineral and organic). The process of breaking this down is either accelerated or decelerated by the climate. Living organisms are also in soil, the poop from organisms decomposes and gives soil organic matter. They also die and do the same thing. Topography also impacts this. This takes TIME!!! So much time! 1 cm takes at least a thousand years to make.

• The top layer of soil is called “O”, this is dead animals, organic material, and freshly fallen leaves.

• The next layer is “A”, which his a mixture of clay, silt, and sand depending on the biome.

• “B” layer is clay, humus, and other materials leached from A, this is as far as plant roots usually go deep

• “C” goes all the way to the crust, this is weathered parent material, rock fragments and bedrock/granite. Deserts are mostly just this

Water!

• 71% of the world is covered in water. 97% of that is in the ocean. 2% is in the ice caps and glaciers, and freshwater in rivers, lakes, and the ground is less that 1%.

• Lakes!

  • The great lakes were carved out by glaciers

  • With thermal stratifications, different thermoclines literally stop the water from mixing with the other layers as would be expected

  • Over time, lake turnover mixes nutrients and energy. The stratifications in the summer are very clear due to increased temperature and sunlight. Here, bacteria is stuck at the top. As the season changes to fall, the stratifications start to mix, cycling nutrients and bacteria with them. In winter, there are stratifications again, and then during spring they are eliminated and mix again. Lake turnover occurs during spring and fall. Due to human activity putting excess nutrients in water with synthetic fertilizer, there is too much algae which kills the lake turnover cycle.

  • Oligotrophic lakes are good, eutrophic lakes are typically bad and caused by humans.

  • Too many nutrients in water and the summer sunlight will cause bacteria and algae to go crazy, and the things that eat them will also go crazy, and when they eventually die off there are low oxygen and water quality levels. This happened to Lake Erie with Phosphorus, phytoplankton, and zooplankton. The productivity index was first low, then high, then lower, and higher again. The Clean Water Act was made by people who like fishing, not fish. More fish means a more hypoxic lake, and less fish mean a less hypoxic fish. This was happening due to the farming dumbing phosphorus into the lake. The only fish that thrived was the yellow perch, but fishing people don’t like that, so they need to stop the farms.

  • In areas with high phosphorus over time, there is a decrease in species richness. In areas with low phosphorous over time, species richness increased. The productivity index indicates a eutrophic environment when high and an oligotrophic lake when low.

• Flowing water!

  • Streams or rivers

  • Characterized by a watershed, or drainage area that causes the water to flow, they drain into it to give it its flow.

  • Stream orders go from 1 to 12, with 1 being the smallest. A tiny backyard stream might be order 1. It is decided by velocity of the water and the depth. If 2 1s combine it is automatically a 2. A 2 might also start on its own.

  • They either riffle, run, or pool. Riffles are like white water rafting, and really flat water but still fast moving is a run. In a pool, water is being carved out and the overall water starts to build up due to its calmness, and starts taking rocks, causing a riffle. It always flows in this order.

  • The zones in a river and under it include the water column, the benthic zone, hyporheic zone, and phreatic zone. The water itself is the water column, and the benthic zone is the very floor right under the water where it meets the ground. This is where there is the most life. Right under is the sea layer of soil that is holding up the land, the hyporheic zone. The very bottom is the phreatic zone which is like bedrock, holding everything up.

  • Due to the river continuum concept, there is a higher nutrient input is lower order streams, due to leaves falling into the stream. This leads to diversity in these low order areas. With higher orders, there are less diverse species. With low resources, the species must adapt to survive based on them and find niches, and end up being more diverse. Nutrients spiral and accumulate downstream

  • The Mississippi’s waterbase is so large that it picks up so many nutrients from the farmland around it that drains into the gulf of Mexico, causing a mass die off every year.

• Oceans!

  • The shorelines are the most diverse parts of the oceans and likely all of the planet.

  • The intertidal zone is the shoreline, or the ocean’s littoral zone. They become massive carbon sinks due to net primary productivity.

  • Sea otters on the west coast interact with sea urchins. In the intertidal zone there is a ton of carbon. Sea urchins decimated the kelp forests created, but sea urchins love to eat the sea urchins. This relationship of otters eating the urchins made it so there was a ton of kelp.

  • Estuaries, salt marshes, and mangrove forests are where freshwater meets the ocean and the water is a little bit less salty.