APES Chap 1 - 13 vocab
About this set
Created by:
tiggerbaby9099 on January 16, 2012
Log in to favorite or report as inappropriate.
Order by
84 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Millennium Development Goals | a comprehensive set of goals aimed at addressing the most important needs of people in the developing countries to improve their well-being, adopted by the United Nations at the UN Millennium Summit in 2000 |
| Goods | products, such as wood and food, that are extracted from natural ecosystems to satisfy human needs |
| Services | ecosystem functions that are essential to human life and economic well-being, such as waste breakdown, climate regulation, and erosion control. These can be further categorized as regulating, supporting, and provisioning services |
| Millennium Ecosystem Assessment | a 4-year effort by over 1,360 scientists to produce reports of the state of Earth's ecosystems. The reports are aimed t policy makers and the public and are all available on the Internet |
| Environmental Science | the multidisciplinary branch of science concerned with environmental issues |
| Environmental Movement | the up-welling of public awareness and citizen action regarding environmental issues that began during the 1960s |
| Environmentalists | any person who is concerned about the degradation of the natural world and is willing to act on that concern |
| Environmentalism | an attitude or movement involving concern about pollution, resource depletion, population pressures, loss of biodiversity, and other environmental issues. Usually also implies action to address those concerns |
| Sound Science | The basis for our understanding of how the world works and how human systems interact with it. It stems from scientific work based on peer-reviewed research and is one of the unifying themes of this text. |
| Sustainability | a property whereby a process can be continued indefinitely without depleting the energy or material resources on which it depends. As one of the unifying themes of this text, sustainability is the practical goal toward which our interactions with the natural world should be working |
| Stewardship | As one of the unifying themes of this text, stewardship is the actions and programs that manage natural resources and human well-being for the common good |
| Scientific Method | the process of making observations and logically integrating those observations into a model of how the world works. Often involves forming hypotheses, experimenting, and conducting further testing for confirmation |
| Observation | things or phenomena that are perceived through one or more of the basic five senses in their normal state. In addition, to be accepted as factual, observations must be verifiable by others |
| Hypothesis | a tentative guess concerning the cause of an observed phenomenon that is then subjected to experiment to test its logical or empirical consequences |
| Theory | A conceptual formulation that provides a rational explanation or framework for numerous related observations |
| Natural Laws | Generalizations derived from our observations of matter, energy, and other phenomena. Though not absolute, natural laws have been empirically confirmed to a high degree and are often derivable from higher-level theory |
| Junk Science | Information presented as valid science but unsupported peer-reviewed research. Often, politically motivated and biased results are selected to promote a particular point of view |
| Sustainable Yields | the taking of a biological resource (fish or forests) that does not exceed the capacity of the resource to reproduce and replace itself |
| Equity principle | an ethical principle claiming that those who produce the most pollution should compensate those who produce less, especially since the less fortunate often suffer the most from, say, global climate change |
| Environmental Racism | Discrimination against people of color whereby hazardous industries are sited in nonwhite neighborhoods and towns |
| Economics | The social science that deals with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services |
| Centrally Planned Economy | an economic system in which a ruling class makes most of the basic decisions about how the economy will be structured; typical of communist countries |
| Free-Market Economy | an economy in which the market itself determines what and how goods will be exchanged. The system is wholly in private hands |
| World Trade Organization | a body that sets the rules for international trade agreements, made up of representatives from many countries and often dominated by the rich nations |
| Doha Development Round | Negotiations for trade begun in 2001 with the objective of lowering trade barriers around the world |
| Ecological Economists | an economist who thoroughly integrates ecological and economic concerns; part of a new breed of economist who disagrees with classical economic theory |
| Produced Capital | The stock of building, machinery, vehicles, and other elements of a country's infrastructure that are essential to the production of economic goods and services. One component of the wealth of nations. |
| Natural Capital | The natural assets and the services they perform. One form of the wealth of a nation is its complement of natural capital |
| Intangible Capital | One component of the wealth of nations. Comprises the human capital, or the population and its attributes; the social capital, or the social and political environment that people have created in a society; and the knowledge assets, or the human fund of knowledge |
| Gross Domestic Product | the total value of all goods and services exchanged in a year within a country |
| Genuine Progress Indicator | an alternative measure of economic progress, the GPI calculates positive and negative economic activities to reach a more realistic view of sustainable activity. It is an alternative to the gross domestic product |
| Discount Rate | in economics, a rate applied to some future benefit or cost in order to calculate its present real value |
| Payments for Ecosystem Services | A market-based system that pays owners who hold properties that provide valuable services |
| Benefit-cost analysis | A comparison of the benefits of any particular action or project to its cost |
| External cost | any effect of a business process not included in the usual calculations of profit and loss. example of a negative external cost = pollution of air or water (cost on society that is not paid for by the business itself) |
| Internal cost | costs that a business bases its price on. They include costs like materials, energy, labour, plant and equipment and overheads. |
| Regulatory Right to Know Act | Legislation or regulation that requires an employer or producer to disclose full information on hazardous materials disposed, emitted, produced, stored, or used in a work environment or community |
| Ecology | the study of all processes influencing the distribution and abundance of organisms and the interactions between living things and their environment |
| Species | all the organisms (plant, animals, or microbe) of a single kind, The "single kind" is determined by similarity of appearance or by the fact that members do or can mate and produce fertile offspring. Physical, chemical, or behavioral differences block breeding between species |
| Population | a group within a single species whose individuals can freely interbreed |
| Biota | the sum total of all living organisms. The term usually is applied to the setting of natural ecosystems |
| Biotic community | all the living organisms (plants, animals, and microorganisms) that live in a particular area |
| Abiotic | pertaining to factors or things that are separate and independent from living things; nonliving |
| Ecosystem | an interactive complex of communities and the abiotic environment affecting them within a particular area. Ecosystems have characteristic forms, such as deserts, grasslands, tundra, deciduous forests, and tropical rain forests |
| Ecotone | a transitional region between two adjacent ecosystems that contains some of the species and characteristics of each one and also certain species of its own |
| Landscape | a group of interacting ecosystems occupying adjacent geographical areas |
| Biomes | A group of ecosystems that are related by having a similar type of vegetation governed by similar climatic conditions. Examples include prairies, deciduous forests, arctic tundra, deserts, and tropical rain forests |
| Biosphere | the overall ecosystem of Earth. The sum total of all the biomes and smaller ecosystems, which ultimately are all interconnected and interdependent through global processes such as the water cycle and the atmospheric cycle |
| Range of Tolerance | the range of conditions within which an organism or population can survive and reproduce - for example, the range from the highest to the lowest temperature that can be tolerated. Within the range of tolerance is the optimum, or best, condition. |
| Limits of Tolerance | the extremes of any factor (temperature) that an organism or population can tolerate and still survive and reproduce |
| Zone of stress | regions where a species finds conditions tolerable but sub-optimal. The species survives but is under stress. |
| Limiting Factor | a factor primarily responsible for determining the growth or reproduction of an organism or a population. It may be physical (temperature or light) or biological (competing species) |
| Law of Limiting Factors | the law stating that a system may be limited by the absence or minimum amount (in terms of that needed) of any required factor |
| Synergism | the phenomenon whereby two factors acting together have a greater effect than would be indicated by the sum of their effects separately - as, for example, the sometimes fatal mixture of modest does of certain drugs in combination with modest doses of alcohol |
| Habitat | the specific environment (woods, desert, swamp) in which an organism lives |
| Niche | the total of all the relationships that bear on how an organism copes with the biotic and abiotic factors it faces |
| Matter | any gas, liquid, or solid that occupies space and has mass |
| Atom | the fundamental unit of all elements |
| Elements | a substance that is made up of one and only distinct kind of atom |
| Molecule | the smallest unit of two or more atoms forming a compound. A molecule has all the characteristics of the compound which it is a unit. |
| Compound | any substance (gas, liquid or solid) that is made up of two or more different kinds of atoms bonded together. |
| Atmosphere | the thin layer of gases surrounding Earth. Nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, and carbon dioxide are major gases, while many minor gases are also present in trace amounts |
| Hydrosphere | the water on Earth, in all of its liquid and solid compartments: oceans, rivers, lakes, ice, and groundwater |
| Lithosphere | the Earth's crust, made up of rocks and minerals |
| Organic compounds/molecules | all chemical compounds or molecules, natural or synthetic, that contain carbon atoms as an integral part of their molecular structure |
| Inorganic compounds/molecules | all chemical compounds or molecules that do not contain carbon atoms as an integral part of their molecular structure |
| Synthetic organics | any of a large group of organic compounds that may be synthesized in chemical laboratories and are known by the difficulty with which they degrade in the environment |
| Energy | the capacity to do work. Common forms are light, heat, electricity, motion and the chemical bond energy inherent in compounds such as sugar, gasoline, and other fuels |
| Kinetic Energy | the energy inherent in motion or movement, including molecular movement (heat) and the movement of waves (hence, radiation and therefore light) |
| Potential Energy | the ability to do work that is stored in some chemical or physical state. example = gasoline is a form of potential energy because the ability to do work is stored in the chemical state and released as the fuel is burned in an engine |
| Chemical Energy | the potential energy that is contained in certain chemicals; most importantly, the energy that is contained in organic compounds such as food and fuels and that may be released through respiration or burning |
| Calorie | a fundamental unit of energy. the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius |
| First Law of Thermodynamics (Law of Conservation of Energy) | energy is never created or destroyed but may be converted from one form to another (ex. electricity to light) |
| Second Law of Thermodynamics | in every energy conversion, some of the energy is converted to heat and some heat always escapes from the system because it always moves toward a cooler place. |
| Entropy | a degree of disorder; increasing entropy means increasing disorder |
| Producers | in an ecosystem, those organisms (mostly green plants) that use light energy to construct their organic constituents from inorganic compounds |
| Consumers | in an ecosystem; those organisms that derive their energy from feeding on other organisms of their products |
| Oxidation | a chemical reaction that generally involves a breakdown of some substance through its combining with oxygen. (Ex = burning and cellular respiration) |
| Photosynthesis | the chemical process carried on by green plants through which light energy is used to produce glucose from carbon dioxide and water. Oxygen is released as a by-product |
| Cell Respiration | the chemical process that occurs in all living cells whereby organic compounds are broken down to release energy required for life processes |
| Hydrologic Cycle | the movement of water from points of evaporation, through the atmosphere, through precipitation, and through or over ground, returning to points of evaporation |
| Biogeochemical Cycle | the repeated pathway of particular nutrients or elements from the environment through one or more organisms and back to the environment. Includes the nitrogen, phosphorous and carbon cycle. |
| Nitrogen Fixation | the process of chemically converting nitrogen gas from the air into compounds such as nitrates or ammonia that can be used by plants in building amino acids and other nitrogen-containing organic molecules |
| Denitrification | the process of reducing oxidized nitrogen compounds present in soil or water to nitrogen gas to the atmosphere, conducted by certain bacteria and now utilized in the treatment of sewage effluents |
First Time Here?
Welcome to Quizlet, a fun, free place to study. Try these flashcards, find others to study, or make your own.