Interactions: Ch. 2/3
Order by
27 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 producer | makes it own food(plants) |
| consumer | eats food made by others |
| herbivore | eats plants |
| carnivore | eats meat |
| omnivore | eats meat and plants |
| scavenger | eats dead animals |
| decomposer | breaks down what's left to become elements in the soil |
| food chain | series of events in which on organism eats another and obtains energy |
| food web | all of the overlapping food chains in an environment |
| energy pyramid | shows the amount of energy that moves from one feeding level to another in a food web |
| water cycle | continuous process by which water moves from the Earth's surface, to the atmosphere, and back |
| evaporation | the process by which molecules of liquid water and absorb energy and change to a gas |
| condensation | the process by which a gas changes to a liquid |
| precipitation | heavy drops fall back to Earth (snow, rain, sleet, hail) |
| nitrogen fixation | the process of changing free nitrogen into a usable form of nitrogen; performed by legumes (clover, beans, peanuts, alfalfa, peas) |
| natural resources | anything in the environment that is used by people |
| renewable resource | always available or are naturally replaced in a relatively short time (sunlight, water, trees, wind) |
| nonrenewable resource | natural resources that are not replaced in a useful time frame (coal, oil) |
| pollution | contamination of Earth's land, water, or air |
| environmental science | study of the natural processes in the environment and how humans can affect them |
| clear-cutting | process of cutting down all of the trees in an area at once |
| selective cutting | cutting down only some trees in a forest and leaving a mix of tree sizes and species behind |
| sustainable yield | amount of renewable resource such as trees that can be harvested regularly without reducing the future supply |
| fishery | area with a large population of valuable ocean organisms |
| aquaculture | practice of raising fish and other water dwelling organisms for food |
| transpiration | water that plants produce through their leaves into the air |
| percolation | ground water |
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