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85 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Autoecology
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a branch of ecology that focuses on the relationship and interactions between the individual and its environment
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Population Ecology
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examines the interactions between a population and its environment
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population
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is a group of individuals that belong to the same species and inhabit a particular locale
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Community Ecology
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studies the interactions among the populations of all species living in an area at a particular time
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Ecosystem Ecology
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is the study of most inclusive interactions, those among all the biotic and abiotic components of the system
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Habitat
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1)the physical location of an organism in the environment
2)the type of environment vegetation, climate, and do forth inhabited by an organism |
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Ecological Niche
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the ecological role of the species in the community including the interactions in which it participates The ecological niche of an organism depends not only on where it lives but also on what it does. By analogy, it may be said that the habitat is the organism's "address", and the niche is its "profession", biologically speaking.
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Biotic Factors
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are all the living things or their materials that directly or indirectly affect an organism in its environment. This would include organisms, their presence, parts, interaction, and wastes. Factors such as parasitism, disease, and predation (one animal eating another) would also be classified as biotic factors.
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Abiotic factors
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are those non-living physical and chemical factors which affect the ability of organisms to survive and reproduce.
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Ecotherms/ endotherms
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An ectotherm is an animal in which the internal body temperature is the same as the temperature of its surroundings. Fish, amphibians, and reptiles are ectotherms. Ectotherms can not control their internal body temperature and therefore have to stay in either the sun to stay warm, or the shade to keep cool.
Endotherms are animals that can maintain a constant internal body temperature, regardless of the temperature of their surroundings. Birds and mammals are endotherms. Do you have a constant internal body temperature? You bet! You are also an endotherm. Humans have a constant body temperature of 98.6 °F. |
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Competition
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the interaction of two species over a limiting resource that negatively impacts the other or both their population growth rate
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Preemptive Competition
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a competition amongst individual plants over space
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interspecific competition
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competition between two or more species
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intraspecific competition
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between members of the same species
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Exploitation competition
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this is when the actions of one species or individual in the case of intraspecific significantly reduce the amount or availability of a resource
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interference competition
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competition when one species actively interferes with the ability of one or more others to use a resource
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allelopathy
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in which an organism releases chemicals or toxins that have detrimental affect onto another
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Predation
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the capture killing and consumption of another animal by another
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carnivory
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the predation interaction in which an organism captures kills and consumes an animal
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Herbivory
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the consuption of plant tissue by an animal can be broken down to grazers that consume leafty material or granivores those whom consume seeds we also have browsers who consume woody material and frugivore those whom consume fruit
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Parasites
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an organism that forms an association with one or more individual of another species called host in order to obtain nutrients or energy from them
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What is a guild
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species known as guilds, which exploit the same kinds of resources in comparable ways. The name “guild” emphasizes the fact that these groups are like associations of craftsmen who employ similar techniques in plying their trade. Guilds may consist of different insect species that collect nectar in similar ways, various bird species that employ corresponding insect-foraging techniques, or diverse plant species that have evolved comparable floral shapes with which they attract the same group of pollinators
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Hutchinsonian Niche
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Hutchinsonian niche - range of combinations
of all relevant environmental variables under which a species or population can persist (think: needs for reproduction, rearing, etc.) |
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Competitive exclusion principle
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two or
more species cannot coexist when they share a limited resource |
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Niche segregation
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the tendency for two
species that live in the same area and require similar resources to have niche requirements that differ in one or more dimensions |
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fundamental
niche. |
The collection of environmental variables
that a species can use is its |
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realized
niche. |
The actual niche occupied by a species in
the face of other exclusions |
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functional niche
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is defined on behavioral considerations
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Proximate
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explanations focus on how a phenomenon works (what controls the
phenomenon, as it is now seen |
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ultimate
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explanations focus on why a trait exists, rather than one of other plausible
alternatives |
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Trophic level
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Trophic levels are the feeding position in a food chain such as primary producers, herbivore, primary carnivore, etc. Green plants form the first trophic level, the producers. Herbivores form the second trophic level, while carnivores form the third and even the fourth trophic levels. In this section we will discuss what is meant by food chains, food webs and ecological pyramids.
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food chain/ web
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The feeding of one organism upon another in a sequence of food transfers is known as a food chain. Another definition is the chain of transfer of energy (which typically comes from the sun) from one organism to another. A simple food chain is like the following: In an ecosystem there are many different food chains and many of these are cross-linked to form a food web
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Decomposers
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feed only on organic compounds in dead material
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Primary consumer
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eats producers
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Secondary consumer
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eats primary consumers or other secondary consumers
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Connectance
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= number of links/total number of links possible
Total number of links possible = (n[n-1])/2 = with n Low ratio means that species eat relatively few other species and the food web is simpler High ratio means that species eat lots of other species and the food web is complex |
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Succession
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Non-seasonal change in species composition as a function of time, usually following disturbance.
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primary succession
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quence of communities developing in a newly exposed habitat devoid of life (eg. succession on bare rock, newly deposited sand).
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secondary succession
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sequence of communities taking place on sites that have already supported life
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Heterotrophic (Degradative) succession
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Succession on a degradable source; most living biomass is animal, fungal, or microbial material.
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sere/seral stage/ climax
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Sere: A series of successional stages (equivalently, a continuum with time as the environmental gradient).
Seral stage (successional stage): recognizable types of communities during succession. For example, annual herb, perennial herb, shrub, forest. Stages do not need to be distinct. Climax (in glossary): the end point of a successional sequence, or sere; a community that has reached a steady state under a particular set of environmental conditions |
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disturbance
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an abrupt event that removes individual organisms or biomass and opens up space (or frees resources) which can be exploited by other organisms.
Disturbances vary in spatial scale, intensity, frequency, and type. |
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optimal foraging
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Optimal foraging is strictly behavioral ecology. In this kind of analysis we look at the performance of a behavior. The assumption of the theory of optimal foraging is that organisms will be energy maximizers or time minimizers. Energy maximizers try to get the most energy out of an environment and time minimizers try to get the energy they need in the least possible time. Thus, any time energy is limiting, an approach such as this is very useful. Some examples of variations of this are
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allee effect
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he positive relationship between population density and the reproduction and survival of individuals is often known as the "Allee effect". An Allee or underpopulation effect arises when the per-capita birth rate (B) increases with population density to some maximum value, the reproductive potential of the species, and the death rate (D) remains constant (see figure). The point U where the two rates intersect is an unstable equilibrium because:
1. When N = U, then births equal deaths, R = 0, and the population remains unchanged. 2. When N < U, then births are less than deaths, R < 0, and the population declines to extinction. 3. When N > U, then the births exceed deaths, R > 0, and the population grows continuously. |
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K/r selection
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r-selection refers to evolutionary competition in the rate of a population’s free exponential
increase. This is contrasted with K-selection, in which populations in steady-state compete in efficiency of resource conversion |
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Intermediate disturbance hypothesis
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is an ecological hypothesis which proposes that biodiversity is highest when disturbance is neither too rare nor too frequent
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MacArthur (4) coined the term "diffuse competition
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to
describe the total competitive effects of a number of interspecific competitors. |
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What is the main purpose of the community analysis lab?
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Communites of species can provide excellent indicators of environmental conditions over long periods of time because each species of plant has particular growth Requirements
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What does stratisfied sampling mean
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when inappropriate areas are omitted from a sampling plan
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What is the definition of density??
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density is the number of individuals of a species found in a particular unit area
n/area |
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Basal Area?
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is the area of a circle created by a tree's bole at 4.5 feet above ground level it is a way of measuring the size of a tree which would be one way of assessing the dominance of an individual species pie 2 squared
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Importance value
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the importance value of each sampled species is an index of its relative importance in the tree vegetation of the size
(RDi + RBAi)/ |
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Emergent properties
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properties that evolve from different aspects of studies that you can not single down to a single discipline
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Flora/ Fauna
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flora refers to the plant community and the fauna refers to the animal community
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Deterministic vs. Contigent
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deterministic are designated communities that you know the outcome at the very beggining contigent (stochastic) you will just leave to chance
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bio indicator
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species that can be used to give you information about the climate
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Random sampling
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a sample is a subset of a population and we use stats and probability to extrapolate data from smaller samples into a larger population random samples are very important because it is unpredictable and has no biased
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what are the characteristics that are bio indicators
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growth rates (fast, medium, slow) mosture regime of trees (moist saturated most of the year, MODERATE species found in areas where soil will be moist but no saturated and may be dry sometimes during the year, dry rarely moist and dry out quickly following a precipation event)
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Successional status
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sun: species which must have full sun light to grow as seedlings and small trees mature trees can survive in some shade
shade species which can grow well in shade as seedling and small tress and mature trees can survive and grow in the shade |
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Geometric growth models
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main assumption is that we are dealing with discrete generation
N(t)=Ro^t No |
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Exponential Growth model
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is density independent and have continuous generations
N(t)=Noe^RT |
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Logistic Growth models
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deals with continuous generations and density dependent and deals with intraspecific competition
DN/dt=rN(K-N)/K) |
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Descriptive statistics
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you are characterizing a sample. With descriptive statistics you are simply describing what is or what the data shows
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Central Tendency
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The central tendency of a distribution is an estimate of the "center" of a distribution of values. There are three major types of estimates of central tendency:
Mean Median Mode |
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Dispersion
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Dispersion refers to the spread of the values around the central tendency. There are two common measures of dispersion, the range and the standard deviation. The range is simply the highest value minus the lowest value.
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Standard Deviation
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is a more accurate and detailed estimate of dispersion because an outlier can greatly exaggerate the range to compute the standard deviation we will calculate how far the actual value lies from the mean square the value and some them (sum of values and dividing by n-1 is the (variance)and the square root is the standard deviation
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standard error (of the mean)
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a measure of variation (dispersion) this is s/SQRT (N)
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Confidence interval
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related to how likely it is that the true mean lies witin a given interval around the sample mean
95% confidence interval: X-bar +/- 1.96(s)/SQRT(n) |
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what three factors affect the width of a confidence interval
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the percentage of confidence is it 99 percent 95 percent, standard deviation, nature of the data
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inferential statistics
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With inferential statistics, you are trying to reach conclusions that extend beyond the immediate data alone. we use inferential statistics to make judgments of the probability that an observed difference between groups is a dependable one or one that might have happened by chance in this study. Thus, we use inferential statistics to make inferences from our data to more general conditions; we use descriptive statistics simply to describe what's going on in our data.
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the t- test
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The t-test assesses whether the means of two groups are statistically different from each other. This analysis is appropriate whenever you want to compare the means of two groups, and especially appropriate as the analysis for the posttest-only two-group randomized experimental design we have to judge the difference between their means relative to the spread or variability of their scores. The formula for the t-test is a ratio. The top part of the ratio is just the difference between the two means or averages.
Once you compute the t-value you have to look it up in a table of significance to test whether the ratio is large enough to say that the difference between the groups is not likely to have been a chance finding. To test the significance, you need to set a risk level (called the alpha level). In most social research, the "rule of thumb" is to set the alpha level at .05. This means that five times out of a hundred you would find a statistically significant difference between the means even if there was none (i.e., by "chance"). You also need to determine the degrees of freedom (df) for the test. In the t-test, the degrees of freedom is the sum of the persons in both groups minus 2. Given the alpha level, the df, and the t-value, you can look the t-value up in a standard table of significance (available as an appendix in the back of most statistics texts) to determine whether the t-value is large enough to be significant. If it is, you can conclude that the difference between the means for the two groups is different (even given the variability) |
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What would be the null hypothesis
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no difference between means due to chance variation alone
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what would be the alternative hypothesis
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there is a difference between means
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what type of error is alpha
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a type 1 error
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Trophic levels
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organisms obtain their food in a variety of ways trophic levels are the link in the food chain
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Periodicity
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in ecosystems that have fluctuations in climate you will often see the differences in the ecosytems when the weather is at two extremes
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succession
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If undisturbed, an open field over time will be invaded by shrubs, which in turn will be replaced by saplings, young trees, and eventually a mature forest. Foresters often refer to these phases as the grass and forbs stage, shrub and sapling stage, pole stage, and mature forest. In general, plant communities progress in an orderly and predictable manner known as forest succession. How-ever, the rate of forest succession on any one property is difficult to predict and may vary with soil conditions, topography, frequency of natural disturbance, number of deer, and amount of competing vegetation. The abundance and kinds of wildlife also change as a forest matures, because the quantity and quality of food, water, cover, and space are changing. Young forests, for example, often have an abundance of berry-producing shrubs and brushy cover, but few hard mast (acorns, hickory nuts) or cavity trees. As a result, species that feed on acorns (e.g. squirrels) or nest in large decaying trees (e.g., pileated wood-peckers) are much more abundant in older forests. the white-tailed deer, use several stages of plant succession. Deer need the cover provided by thickets of shrubs and saplings, but they also feed extensively on acorns found under trees in a mature forest and seek out succulent green vegetation and grains in agricultural fields
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Geologic formations
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geology concerns the kinds of earth processes that operate in an area the topography of the community can also be responsible for the creation of microclimates
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Microclimatology
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the study of climates near the ground important in determining the natural occurence of species hill top valley bottoms and difference in slope exposure
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inwood park is apart of what community classification
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oak hickory subdivision of the eastern deciduous forest.
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Dendrochronology
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trees can be aged by counting their growth rings
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Generalists and specialists
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some species can tolerate a very wide range of conditions while others are very specific conditions
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introduced species
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species not native to this region of north america
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Stratification
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the vegetation in the forest occurs in layers the taller plants are the canopy trees then come the subcanpoy layer and then the shrubs then the layer of herbs and then mosses are layer the compensation point is the layer where plants can meet their minimum requirements
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inwood hill park has what kind of geography
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it is elevated above from it surrounding bedrock is tough resistant material known as the manhattan schist around the park is inwood marble palisades cliffs which are an example of intrusive sill
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