Flashcards: Ecology

Myrmecophily (/mɜːrmᵻˈkɒfᵻli/; literally "ant-love") is the term applied to positive interspecies associations between ants and a variety of other organisms such as plants, other arthropods, and fungi.

A natural landscape is the original landscape that exists before it is acted upon by human culture.

Ecology is a new science and considered as an important branch of biological science, having only become prominent during the second half of the 20th century.

An ecotone is a transition area between two biomes.

ISO 14000 is a family of standards related to environmental management that exists to help organizations (a) minimize how their operations (processes, etc.) negatively affect the environment (i.e., cause adverse changes to air, water, or land); (b) comply with applicable laws, regulations, and other environmentally oriented requirements, and (c) continually improve in the above.

Paleoecology (also spelt palaeoecology) uses data from fossils and subfossils to reconstruct the ecosystems of the past.

Plant ecology is a subdiscipline of ecology which studies the distribution and abundance of plants, the effects of environmental factors upon the abundance of plants, and the interactions among and between plants and other organisms.

Scavenging is both a carnivorous and a herbivorous feeding behavior in which the scavenger feeds on dead animal and plant material present in its habitat.

Sociobiology is a field of scientific study that is based on the hypothesis that social behavior has resulted from evolution and attempts to examine and explain social behavior within that context.

The Gaia hypothesis, also known as Gaia theory or Gaia principle, proposes that organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.

Phenology is the study of periodic plant and animal life cycle events and how these are influenced by seasonal and interannual variations in climate, as well as habitat factors (such as elevation).

An introduced, alien, exotic, non-indigenous, or non-native species, or simply an introduction, is a species living outside its native distributional range, which has arrived there by human activity, either deliberate or accidental.

A plant community (sometimes "phytocoenosis" or "phytocenosis") is a collection or association of plant species within a designated geographical unit, which forms a relatively uniform patch, distinguishable from neighboring patches of different vegetation types.

Acclimatization (UK also acclimatisation; US also acclimation) is the process in which an individual organism adjusts to a gradual change in its environment (such as a change in temperature, humidity, photoperiod, or pH), allowing it to maintain performance across a range of environmental conditions.

Biogeography is the study of the distribution of species and ecosystems in geographic space and through (geological) time.

A habitat is an ecological or environmental area that is inhabited by a particular species of animal, plant, or other type of organism.

Red tide is a common name for a phenomenon known as an algal bloom (large concentrations of aquatic microorganisms) when it is caused by a few species of dinoflagellates and the bloom takes on a red or brown color.

Myco-heterotrophy (Greek: μυκός mykós, "fungus", ἕτερος heteros = "another", "different" and τροφή trophe = "nutrition") is a symbiotic relationship between certain kinds of plants and fungi, in which the plant gets all or part of its food from parasitism upon fungi rather than from photosynthesis.

Ecological engineering is an emerging study of integrating ecology and engineering, concerned with the design, monitoring, and construction of ecosystems.

FutureGen is a project (now suspended) to demonstrate capture and sequestration of waste carbon dioxide from a coal-fired electrical generating station.

Bioremediation is a waste management technique that involves the use of organisms to remove or neutralize pollutants from a contaminated site.

Environmental ethics is the part of environmental philosophy which considers extending the traditional boundaries of ethics from solely including humans to including the non-human world.

The soundscape is the component of the acoustic environment that can be perceived by humans.

Natural resources are resources that exist without actions of humankind.

An Ecotax (short for ecological taxation) is a tax levied on activities which are considered to be harmful to the environment and is intended to promote environmentally friendly activities via economic incentives.

In evolutionary ecology, an ecotype, sometimes called ecospecies, describes a genetically distinct geographic variety, population or race within a species, which is adapted to specific environmental conditions.

Overfishing is a form of overexploitation where fish stocks are reduced to below acceptable levels.

Life timelineview • discuss • -4500 —–-4000 —–-3500 —–-3000 —–-2500 —–-2000 —–-1500 —–-1000 —–-500 —–0 —waterSingle-celledlifephotosynthesisEukaryotesMulticellularlifeLand lifeDinosaurs MammalsFlowers ←Earliest Earth (-4540)←Earliest water←Earliest life(-4100)←LHB meteorites←Earliest oxygen←Atmospheric oxygen←Oxygen Crisis←Earliest sexual reproduction←Cambrian explosion←Earliest humansPhanrzcProterozoicArcheanHadeanAxis scale: millions of years.

In ecology, regime shifts are large, abrupt, persistent changes in the structure and function of a system.

Taylor's law (also known as Taylor’s power law) is an empirical law in ecology that relates the variance of the number of individuals of a species per unit area of habitat to the corresponding mean by a power law relationship.

Tropical vegetation is any vegetation in tropical latitudes.

Tropical ecology is the study of the relationships between the biotic and abiotic components of the tropics, or the area of the Earth that lies between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn (23.4378° N and 23.4378° S, respectively).

In biology, two species or populations are considered sympatric when they exist in the same geographic area and thus regularly encounter one another.

The H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, commonly referred to as Andrews Forest, is located near Blue River, Oregon, United States, and is managed cooperatively by the United States Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station, Oregon State University, and the Willamette National Forest.

The Marsh Award for Conservation Biology, established 1991, is an Award run in partnership between the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and the Marsh Christian Trust that recognises an individual for his or her "contributions of fundamental science to the conservation of animal species and habitats".

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to ecology: Ecology – scientific study of the distribution and abundance of living organisms and how the distribution and abundance are affected by interactions between the organisms and their environment.

Political ecology is the study of the relationships between political, economic and social factors with environmental issues and changes.

Ecosystem health is a metaphor used to describe the condition of an ecosystem.

Novel ecosystems are human-built, modified, or engineered niches of the Anthropocene.

A nutrient cycle (or ecological recycling) is the movement and exchange of organic and inorganic matter back into the production of living matter.

A mating system is a way in which a group is structured in relation to sexual behaviour.

The Mesoamerican Society for Ecological Economics (SMEE) is a regional chapter of the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE).

Pursuit predation is a form of predation in which predators give chase to fleeing prey.

The International Biocontrol Manufacturers' Association (IBMA) is the worldwide association of the Biocontrol industry with its head office in Brussels.

A rocky shore is an intertidal area of seacoasts where solid rock predominates.

Species distribution is the manner in which a biological taxon is spatially arranged.

Ecoinformatics, or ecological informatics, is the science of information (Informatics) in Ecology and Environmental science.

Geotope is the geological component of the abiotic matrix present in an ecotope.

Theoretical ecology is the scientific discipline devoted to the study of ecological systems using theoretical methods such as simple conceptual models, mathematical models, computational simulations, and advanced data analysis.

Biometeorology is the interdisciplinary field of science that studies the interactions between the biosphere and the Earth's atmosphere on time scales of the order of seasons or shorter (by opposition to bioclimatology).

Ecophysiology (from Greek οἶκος, oikos, "house(hold)"; φύσις, physis, "nature, origin"; and -λογία, -logia), environmental physiology or physiological ecology is a biological discipline that studies the adaptation of an organism's physiology to environmental conditions.

The counterculture of the 1960s refers to an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon that developed first in the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US) and then spread throughout much of the Western world between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s, with London, New York City, and San Francisco being hotbeds of early countercultural activity.

Genetic erosion is a process whereby an already limited gene pool of an endangered species of plant or animal diminishes even more when individuals from the surviving population die off without getting a chance to meet and breed with others in their endangered low population.

Degrowth (in French: décroissance, in Spanish: decrecimiento, in Italian: decrescita, in Catalan: decreixement, in German: Postwachstum, in Polish: postwzrost) is a political, economic, and social movement based on ecological economics, anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist ideas.