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Studied by 3 peopleCOMPLETE notbook lm flashcards
Flashcard 1
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Front: What is a biome?
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Back: A large naturally occurring community of flora and fauna occupying a major habitat, e.g., forest or tundra.1 Climate shapes the nature and distribution of biomes.1
Flashcard 2
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Front: What causes the temperature to drop with increased elevation?
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Back: Temperature tends to drop about 6.5°C per kilometre in elevation due to the decreasing density of the atmosphere and the reduced ability to retain heat.1
Flashcard 3
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Front: What primarily causes seasons?
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Back: Seasons are caused by the Earth's tilt on its axis, not by its elliptical orbit or varying distance from the sun.2
Flashcard 4
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Front: What is the Coriolis effect?
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Back: The Coriolis effect is the deflection of moving objects when they are viewed from a rotating frame of reference, like the Earth. This affects wind patterns and ocean currents.3
Flashcard 5
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Front: What is evapotranspiration?
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Back: Evapotranspiration is the sum of evaporation from soils and water bodies plus the amount of water transpired by plants.4 The ratio of evapotranspiration and precipitation determines biomes.4
Flashcard 6
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Front: What is convergent evolution?
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Back: Convergent evolution is the independent evolution of similar structures in unrelated organisms due to similar environmental pressures.5
Flashcard 7
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Front: Describe the tundra biome.
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Back: Tundra is the coldest biome, located near the North Pole, with short days in winter limiting the growing season.5
Flashcard 8
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Front: Describe a deciduous forest.
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Back: Deciduous forests have trees that lose their leaves at the end of the growing season, and feature moderate temperatures and precipitation all year round.6
Flashcard 9
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Front: Describe the savanna biome.
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Back: Savannas are dominated by tall grasses, have seasonal rainfall and are found in eastern Africa, southern South America, and Australia.7
Flashcard 10
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Front: What is a key factor influencing aquatic biomes?
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Back: The depth to which sunlight penetrates water, influencing primary producers and food webs.8
Flashcard 11
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Front: What are the main types of aquatic biomes?
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Back: Freshwater, estuary, and saltwater biomes.8
Flashcard 12
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Front: What are the characteristics of a river biome?
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Back: Rivers and streams are freshwater biomes characterised by moving water.9
Flashcard 13
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Front: What is an estuary?
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Back: An estuary is an ecotone between freshwater and saltwater environments.9
Flashcard 14
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Front: What is the intertidal zone?
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Back: The intertidal zone lies along coastlines between high and low tides.9
Flashcard 15
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Front: Where do nutrients primarily come from in deeper waters?
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Back: Detritus sinking from more productive surface waters.1011
Flashcard 16
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Front: What determines global patterns of primary production?
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Back: Climate and nutrient availability.12
Flashcard 17
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Front: What is a species interaction?
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Back: How species affect each other's survival and reproduction, such as competition, mutualism and predation.1314
Flashcard 18
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Front: Define competition between species.
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Back: A species interaction where both species are negatively impacted (-/-), often involving the struggle for limited resources like space and food.14
Flashcard 19
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Front: What is competitive exclusion?
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Back: When two species with very similar niches cannot coexist, and one will outcompete the other and exclude it.15
Flashcard 20
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Front: What is mutualism?
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Back: A species interaction where both species benefit (+/+) from the interaction.14 An example of this includes aphids and bacteria.16
Flashcard 21
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Front: Define predation.
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Back: A species interaction where one species benefits and the other is harmed (+/-), typically where a predator kills and consumes its prey.14
Flashcard 22
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Front: Define commensalism.
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Back: A species interaction where one species benefits and the other is neither harmed nor helped (+/0).14
Flashcard 23
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Front: What is a keystone species?
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Back: A species that has a disproportionately large impact on its ecosystem, relative to its abundance, with their removal resulting in significant changes in the community.14
Flashcard 24
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Front: What is facilitation?
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Back: A species interaction where one species makes the environment more suitable for another species.17
Flashcard 25
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Front: What is a metapopulation?
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Back: A group of spatially separated populations of the same species that interact at some level.18
Flashcard 26
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Front: What is population ecology?
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Back: The study of how populations of organisms interact with their environment and how population sizes change over time.1920
Flashcard 27
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Front: What is exponential population growth?
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Back: Population growth that occurs at a constant rate, leading to a J-shaped curve when plotted on a graph.21
Flashcard 28
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Front: What is logistic population growth?
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Back: Population growth that slows down as it approaches the carrying capacity of the environment, resulting in an S-shaped curve.22
Flashcard 29
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Front: What is carrying capacity?
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Back: The maximum population size that an environment can sustain indefinitely given the available resources.22
Flashcard 30
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Front: What are density-dependent factors?
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Back: Factors that regulate population size and become more intense as population density increases, e.g., competition, disease.22
Flashcard 31
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Front: What are density-independent factors?
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Back: Factors that regulate population size regardless of population density, e.g., temperature, natural disasters.22
Flashcard 32
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Front: What is a cohort?
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Back: A group of individuals in a population that are born around the same time.22
Flashcard 33
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Front: What is survivorship?
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Back: The proportion of individuals that survive to a given age.18
Flashcard 34
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Front: What is an ecosystem?
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Back: A community of living organisms (biotic factors) interacting with their non-living environment (abiotic factors).23
Flashcard 35
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Front: What is the Anthropocene?
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Back: A proposed geological epoch in which humans have become a significant planetary force.24
Flashcard 36
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Front: What is assisted migration?
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Back: The deliberate transplantation of populations to new locations to help them survive climate change.25
Flashcard 37
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Front: What is eutrophication?
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Back: The process where a body of water becomes overly enriched with minerals and nutrients which can lead to dead zones in aquatic environments.26
Flashcard 38
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Front: What is an invasive species?
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Back: A non-native species that spreads rapidly and causes harm to the environment, economy, or human health.27
Flashcard 39
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Front: What is a biological reserve?
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Back: An area of land set aside to protect habitats and biodiversity.28
Flashcard 40
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Front: What is sustainable development?
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Back: Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.29
Flashcard 41
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Front: What are the basic expectations of students and professors in this course?
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Back:
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Students: Arrive on time, print notes, be respectful of others, don't use computers in class.3031
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Professors: Start on time, focus on concepts, make clear what needs to be learned, be open to questions.30
Flashcard 42
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Front: What is deductive thinking in science?
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Back: Advancing hypotheses and comparing them to facts gathered from nature or experiments.32
Flashcard 43
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Front: What are the key components of a controlled experiment?
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Back: Control groups, replication, and randomization.33343536
Flashcard 44
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Front: What is a hypothesis?
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Back: A proposed explanation for a set of facts that can be tested by experiments or observations.37
Flashcard 45
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Front: What does it mean to falsify a hypothesis?
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Back: To prove a hypothesis to be false through experimentation or observation.37
Flashcard 46
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Front: What is a vestigial trait?
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Back: A structure that has no current function but is similar to functional structures in related species.38
Flashcard 47
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Front: What is a homology?
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Back: A similarity between organisms that is due to common ancestry.39
Flashcard 48
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Front: What are the key assumptions of natural selection?
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Back: Heritable variation, differential reproductive success, and selection is not random.40
Flashcard 49
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Front: What is fitness in biology?
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Back: An organism's ability to survive and reproduce, measured by average reproductive success, given heritable traits.41
Flashcard 50
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Front: What is acclimation?
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Back: An individual's physiological response to changes in environmental conditions.42
Flashcard 51
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Front: What are some reasons for a clade to contract?
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Back: Changing conditions (climate change, continents moving), competition from other clades, or from a successful member.43
Flashcard 52
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Front: What are some key characteristics of primates?
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Back: Highly developed stereoscopic vision, versatile limbs, and large brains.44
Flashcard 53
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Front: What are hominins?
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Back: Humans and our upright ancestors.45
Flashcard 54
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Front: What is phylogeny?
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Back: The evolutionary history of a group of organisms, based on their evolutionary relationships.46
Flashcard 55
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Front: What is a monophyletic group (clade or taxon)?
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Back: A group defined by a single common ancestor and all of its descendants.47
Flashcard 56
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Front: What is a synapomorphy?
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Back: A shared, derived trait that is used as evidence that two or more species are closely related.48
Flashcard 57
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Front: What is convergent evolution?
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Back: The independent evolution of similar traits in unrelated species.49
Flashcard 58
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Front: What is parsimony in phylogenetic analysis?
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Back: The principle of choosing the tree that requires the fewest evolutionary changes.50
Flashcard 59
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Front: What are the three domains of life?
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Back: Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya.51
Flashcard 60
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Front: What are the biases in the fossil record?
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Back: Habitat bias, taxonomic bias, temporal bias, and abundance bias.52
Flashcard 61
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Front: What is an adaptive radiation?
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Back: A rapid diversification of a single lineage into many descendant species with different ecological roles.53
Flashcard 62
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Front: What is a mass extinction?
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Back: A period of dramatic species loss.5455
Flashcard 63
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Front: What is a locus?
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Back: A location where a gene can occur in a genome.56
Flashcard 64
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Front: What is an allele?
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Back: A particular version of a gene.56
Flashcard 65
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Front: What does it mean to be heterozygous?
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Back: Having different alleles at a particular locus.57
Flashcard 66
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Front: What does it mean to be homozygous?
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Back: Having two copies of the same allele at a particular locus.57
Flashcard 67
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Front: What is a genotype?
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Back: The collection of an individual's genes.58
Flashcard 68
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Front: What is a phenotype?
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Back: The collection of an individual's physiological and physical traits that can be observed.58
Flashcard 69
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Front: What is the Hardy-Weinberg distribution?
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Back: The distribution of genotypes expected if alleles assort randomly and independently.59
Flashcard 70
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Front: What is genetic drift?
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Back: Change in allele frequencies due to random sampling.60
Flashcard 71
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Front: What is gene flow?
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Back: The movement of alleles from one population to another.61
Flashcard 72
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Front: What is mutation?
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Back: Heritable errors in copying DNA that provide the variation on which natural selection acts.62
Flashcard 73
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Front: What is inbreeding?
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Back: Mating between close relatives, which can lead to more homozygotes and lower survival rates in offspring.63
Flashcard 74
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Front: What is sexual selection?
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Back: A form of natural selection driven by traits related to success in obtaining mates.64
Flashcard 75
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Front: What is directional selection?
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Back: Natural selection that shifts the population in a particular direction over time.65
Flashcard 76
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Front: What is stabilizing selection?
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Back: Natural selection that keeps the population where it is, preventing change in a trait.66
Flashcard 77
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Front: What is disruptive selection?
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Back: Natural selection that favours extreme phenotypes, leading to divergence and speciation.67
Flashcard 78
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Front: What is balancing selection?
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Back: Natural selection that maintains allele diversity.68
Flashcard 79
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Front: What is speciation?
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Back: The process by which new species are formed.69
Flashcard 80
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Front: What is the biological species concept?
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Back: Defines species based on reproductive isolation, meaning that members of the same species can interbreed successfully, but not with other species.70
Flashcard 81
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Front: What is prezygotic isolation?
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Back: Mechanisms that prevent successful mating or fertilisation.70
Flashcard 82
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Front: What is postzygotic isolation?
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Back: Mechanisms that prevent offspring from producing offspring of their own.71
Flashcard 83
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Front: What is the morphological species concept?
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Back: Defines species based on physical differences.72
Flashcard 84
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Front: What is the ecological species concept?
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Back: Defines species based on their ecological niche.73
Flashcard 85
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Front: What is the phylogenetic species concept?
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Back: Defines species as a monophyletic group of populations.73
Flashcard 86
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Front: What is allopatry?
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Back: When organisms live apart from each other.74
Flashcard 87
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Front: What is dispersal?
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Back: The movement of individuals from one area to another that can result in the colonisation of new areas.75
Flashcard 88
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Front: What is a vicariance event?
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Back: A geographic or ecological barrier that splits a population.76
Flashcard 89
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Front: What is sympatry?
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Back: When organisms live in the same geographic area.77
Flashcard 90
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Front: What is reinforcement?
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Back: The process where natural selection favours traits that prevent hybridisation.7879
Flashcard 91
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Front: What are hybrid zones?
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Back: Areas where the ranges of two species overlap, and they interbreed to some degree.80