What is ecology? What levels of biological organization does ecology focus on? W
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What is ecology? What levels of biological organization does ecology focus on? What is climate? What are the most important components of climate? Describe the variation In sunlight intensity in terms of latitude. Describe global air circulation and precipitation patterns. Describe seasonality in terms of the tilt of the earth. How do ocean currents affect the temperature of land masses? Describe how mountains affect air flow to create high and low precipitation areas. What is global climate change? Describe how the greenhouse effect and human activity is causing current global warming. What is a biome? What is an ecotone? Describe the major terrestrial and aquatic biomes. Compare and contrast the different zones of a lake with a marine environment. What is a population? What is a population density? How can sample plots be used to estimate population density and size? How can the mark-recapture method be used to estimate population size? What are dispersion patterns, and what are the three common types? Describe each type. What is demographics? What are life tables? What are survivorship curves? Describe the three general types of curves. What four factors are responsible for changing population size and density? Which two typically have the biggest impact? When does exponential growth occur, and how is it calculated? When does logistic growth occur, and how is it calculated? What is carrying capacity? Can carrying capacity change? Contrast density dependent and density independent factors affecting population growth. What are the common density dependent factors? What is the current global human population size? What is currently happening to the rate of increase? Describe zero population growth. Describe the demographic transition and major factors that cause it. What is a community? Describe each type of interspecific interaction between members in a community. Contrast competitive exclusion with resource partitioning. What is coevolution? Describe several predator and prey adaptations. Describe and contrast parasitism, mutualism, and commensalism. Describe the two components of species diversity. How is the Shannon diversity index used to calculate species diversity? Describe trophic structure, trophic level, food chain, and food web. Describe autotrophs, heterotrophs, producers, decomposers, consumers (primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary). Describe dominant species, ecosystem engineers/foundation species, keystone species, and invasive species. What are disturbances? Why are intermediate disturbance levels often better for the community compared to low/high levels? Contrast primary and secondary succession. What is an ecosystem? What are biotic and abiotic factors? Describe conservation of energy and the laws of thermodynamics. What is the ultimate fate of all energy on Earth? Describe conservation of mass. Describe energy flow and chemical cycling in ecosystems. Describe trophic efficiency. Why are there losses in trophic efficiency? What are the typical energy losses through a food chain? Describe the processes involved in the water cycle. Describe the processes involved in the carbon cycle. Besides living organisms, how is phosphorous cycled? What form of nitrogen is most common in the air?Explanation / Answer
Ecology is a branch of biology that deals with the study of distribution and interaction between organisms, interaction between organisms and their physical environment and structure and function of ecosystems. The distribution of organisms depend upon both living and nonliving factors called as biotic and abiotic factors repectively.
Ecology focuses on various levels of biological organisation which are listed below in increasing hierarchy,
Individual organism: Study of adaptations occuring in individual organisms as a result of natural selection. These organismal level adaptations could be either marphological, physiological, biochemical, behavioral or any combination of these.
Population: Group of organisms constitute the population. The study of changes in size of the population, its composition, density and movement (migration) over a period of time.
Community: Community is population of different species. Here, ecology deals with interaction between different population groups.
Ecosystem: Ecosystem includes all the biotic and abiotic components in that particular area. Study of ecosystem helps us to identify the flow of energy. For example in marine ecosystem, planktons are the primary producers of energy. The energy is then transferred to lobsters, sea urchins and sharks in successive stages.
Biosphere: Biosphere is interaction between ecosystems. Earth as a whole is considered as a single biosphere.
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