Exam 57: Ecosystems

Refer to the graph. The graph shows both atmospheric CO₂ concentration and Antarctic atmospheric temperature anomaly over the past 800,000 years.Discuss the significance of the correlation between these two factors.How do they relate to climate change today?

Energy from the sun controls the hydrologic cycle by causing _______ from the ocean surface.

About 90 percent of the water in the atmosphere comes from the process of evaporation.Most of the remainder comes from the plant process known as _______.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, in every energy exchange, some energy becomes unavailable for further use.What happens to the energy that becomes unavailable?

Compared with the open ocean ecosystem, the continental shelf ecosystem

Primary consumers on land consume an average of 13 percent of the biomass; in aquatic ecosystems, primary consumers consume about 35 percent.What does this say about aquatic ecosystems, compared with terrestrial ecosystems?

The economic value of pollinator services for U.S.agriculture is billions of dollars per year.Eighty percent of all flowering plant species depend on pollination; insect pollinators are required for most fruit and vegetable crops.However, many pollinators are currently declining because of habitat destruction and pesticide use.What ecosystem-related trade-off has occurred in this situation?

In the food chain shown below, which type of organism would have the lowest biomass and why?

A coastal ecosystem is devastated by a flood.According to the disturbance hypothesis regarding length of food chains, a _______ food web will recover first.

In a salt marsh, marsh grasses carry out photosynthesis.Grasshoppers eat the marsh grasses, blackbirds eat the grasshoppers, and hawks eat the blackbirds.In this example, which organisms are dependent on secondary production?

The San Francisco Bay area was once surrounded by extensive tidal marshes, which were filled in for a variety of purposes, including building cities, factories, and other urban structures.These salt marshes once provided homes to many plants and animals and provided flood control and clean water to the human residents.These ecosystem services, lost when the marshes were drained and filled, belong to which ecosystem service category or categories?

During which process of the hydrologic cycle is water most likely to help in the movement of nutrients through their biogeochemical cycles?

Refer to the table. In general, according to the table, which group of ectotherms is most efficient at storing energy as biomass?

Net secondary production depends on three types of efficiency: consumption efficiency, assimilation efficiency, and _______ efficiency.

The southwestern desert of the United States has very hot temperatures, low precipitation, and high evaporation rates.The soil is alkaline and low in nutrients.These factors result in minimal plant growth and very few species, compared with, for example, the tropical rainforest.One result of this is that desert food webs tend to have, on average, fewer trophic levels than rainforests.This suggests that in deserts the length of a food web is likely limited by

Five ocean currents run close to the coasts at mid-latitudes-the Canary Current off northwest Africa, the Benguela Current off southern Africa, the California Current off California and Oregon, the Humboldt Current off Peru and Chile, and the Somali Current off Somali and Oman.These currents all support major fisheries.These regions are likely so productive because

The Louisiana coast has lost, and continues to lose, many of its wetlands.Much of the loss has resulted from human activity, including building of levees and other flood control structures, carrying out oil exploration and production, and dredging canals for boat traffic.The lost wetlands provided many ecological services, including flood control, fish production, water purification, wildlife habitat, and carbon storage.What factor was most likely not considered when choices were made to replace Louisiana wetlands with human-made structures?

Compared with an ocean ecosystem, a lake ecosystem is more likely to have _______ as its limiting factor for NPP.