Sustaining environmental quality
14 important questions on Sustaining environmental quality
How do species interact?
Species interact in 5 major ways:
- Interspecific competition
- Predation
- Parasitism
- Mutualism
- Commensalism
What two major factors affect the number of species in a community?
2. pollution in aquatic systems
What are the five types of interaction that can occur between species when they share limited resources?
2. Predation: one species feeds directly on the members of other species.
3. Parasitism: one organism feeds on the other by living on the host.
4. mutualism: interaction which benefits both (pollination by honey bees)
5. commensialism; interaction where one benefits from the other without effect on the other. (fish that live on skin bigger fish)
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Why do animals compete with eachother?
Each animals has an ecological text-decorationniche, which includes everything that an animal needs to survive and reproduce. When they compete their niches overlap.
What is resource partitioning?
How can a prey survive?
It can evolve in many ways to avoid predators, use chemical warfare (poisonous, irritating, foul smelling, bad tasting chemicals) and evolve warning coloration.
How do most populations divide over their habitat
2. uniform dispersion; a resource is scarce
3. random dispersion: plentiful resources.
What is the limiting factor principle?
examples can be: temperature, nutrients, oxygen level in water.
What is environmental resistance?
When there are few limiting factors (few predators, ample food supply) an population can grow exponentially (J-curve).
Eventually this will also reach the carrying capacity and then form an s-curve: logistic growth.
What are factors that influence population size? (3)
- density dependent factors: infectuous diseases , competition for resources.
- density independent factors: (effects are not dependent on the density of the population) floods, freeze.
What are four general patterns of variation in population size?
- Stable: size stable around carrying capacity (often in habitats with little variation in circumstances over the year).
- Irrupt: high peak, then crash to stable lower level. short lived, rapidly reproducing species such as algae and insects. Habitat: large seasonal changes or nutrient availability.
- cyclic: boom-bust cycles. population rises and falls over a longer period of time (e.g. hares rise and fall in 10-year cycles). This can be influenced by top-down regulation (decline in size by predators) or bottom-up: decline in size by scarcity in resources.
- irregular: changes in population size with no recurring pattern
Which three factors influence the rate and type of succession in an area?
- Facilitation; species make area suitable for other species (but less suitable for itself) e.g. mosses building up soil.
- Inhibition: early species hinder the establishment of certain other species (e.g. toxic spreading trees)
- Tolerance : plants in later stages of succession are largely unaffected by plants that came in during earlier stages (because they are not in competition for same resources, e.g. shade tolerant plants growing under large trees).
Why is ecological succession so good?
- increase biodiversity
- increases richness and interaction among species
- this interaction increases sustainability by promoting populationcontrol
- increasing the complexity of food webs
- This enhances the energy flow and nutrient cycling
- it's natural ecological restauration
What are the two aspects of stability in living systems?
text-decorationInertia, or persistence: the ability of a living system to survive moderate disturbances.
text-decorationResilience: the ability of a living system to be restored through secondary succession after a more severe disturbance.
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