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1. Past of a planet where life exists. On Earth it extends from the depths of the Oecean to the summit of mountains, but most life exists within few meters of the surface.
2. The planetary system that includes and sustains life, and therefore is made up of the atmosphere, pceans, soils, upperbedrock, and all life. |
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| All the organisms of all species living in an area or region up to and including the biosphere, as in "the biota of the Mojave Desert" or "the biota in that aquarium" |
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| THe maximum abundance of a population or species that can be maintained by a habitat or ecosystem without degrading the ability of that habitat or ecosystem to maintain the abundance in the future |
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| The time necessary for a quantity of what ever is being measure to double |
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| Measure of the total impact a person or society has on the environment. Based on resource use and waste produced. |
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| An equilibrium is a condition of constancy for a system, also referred to as the "rest state" for the system, like an ecosystem or a population. A dynamic quilibrium is on in which the "rest state" changes somewhat and slowly over time. |
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| An ecological community and its local, nonbiological community. An ecosystem is the minimum system that includes and sustains life. It must include atleast and autotroph, a decomposer, a liquid medium, a source and sink of energy, and all the chemical elements required by the autotroph and the decomposer. |
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| A principle of environmental sciences that states that everything affects everything else, meaning that a particular course of action leads to an entire potential string of events. Another way of stating this idea is that you can only do one thing. |
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| Growth in which the rate of increase is a constant percentage of the current size; that is, the growth occurs, at a constant rate per time period. |
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| A kind of system response that occurs when output of the system also serves as input leading to changes in the system. |
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| The Gaia Hypothesis states that the surface environment of Earth, with respect to such factors as the atmospheric composition of reactive gases (for example, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and methane), acidity-alkalinity of waters, and the surface tempature, are actively regulated by the sensing, growth, metabolism and other activities of the biota. Interaction between the physical and biological system on Earth's surface has led to planetwide physiology that began more than 3 billion years ago and the evolution of which can be detected in the fossil record. |
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| Occurs when growth in one of a system exceeds carrying capacity, resulting sudden decline in one or both parts of the system. |
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| The Idea that in spite of the fact that full scientific certainty is often not available to prove cause and effect, we should still take cost-effective precautions to solve environmental problems when there exists a threat of potential serious and/or irreversible environmental damage. |
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| When input equals output in a system, there is no net change, and the system is said to be in a steady state. A bath tub with water flowing in and out at the same rate maintains the same water level and is in a steady state. Compare with equilibrium. |
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| Management of natural resources and the environment with the goals of allowing the harvest of resources to remain at or above some specified level, and the ecosystem to retain its functions and structures. |
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| A set of components that are linked and interact to produce a whole. For example, the river as a system is composed of sediment, water, bank, vegetation, fish, and other living things that all togeth produce the river. |
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