Which of the following areas of study focuses on the exchange of energy, organisms, and materials between ecosystems?
landscape ecology
Which lake zone would be absent in a very shallow lake?
aphotic zone
Which of the following is true with respect to oligotrophic lakes and eutrophic lakes?
Eutrophic lakes are richer in nutrients
Which of the following biomes is correctly paired with the description of its climate?
tropical forests-nearly constant day length and temperature
Which of the following is characteristic of most terrestrial biomes?
vegetation demonstrating vertical layering
The oceans affect the biosphere in all of the following ways except
regulating the pH of freshwater biomes and terrestrial groundwater
Which statement about dispersal is false?
Dispersal occurs only on an evolutionary time scale
When climbing a mountain, we can observe transitions in biological communities that are analogous to the changes
in biomes at different latitudes
Suppose that the number of bird species is determined mainly by the number of vertical strata found in the environment. If so, in which of the following biomes would you find the greatest number of bird species?
tropical rain forest
If the direction of Earth's rotation reversed, the most predictable effect would be
winds blowing from west to east along the equator
Population ecologists follow the fate of same-age cohorts to
determine the birth rate and death rate of each group in a population
A population's carrying capacity
may change as environmental conditions change
Scientific study of the population cycles of the snowshoe hare and its predator, the lynx, has revealed that
multiple biotic and abiotic factors contribute to the cycling of the hare and lynx populations
Based on current growth rates, Earth's human population in 2012 will be closest to
7 billion
A recent study of ecological footprints concluded that
the ecological footprint of the United States is large because per capita resource use is high
The observation that members of a population are uniformly distributed suggests that
the members of the population are competing for access to a resource
According to the logistic growth equation
population growth is zero when N equals K
Which pair of terms most accurately describes life history traits for a stable population of wolves?
iteroparous; K-selected
During exponential growth, a population always
grows at its maximum per capita rate
Which of the following statements about human population in industrialized countries is incorrect?
Life history is r-selected
The feeding relationships among the species in a community determine the community's
trophic structure
The principle of competitive exclusion states that
two species that have exactly the same niche cannot coexist in a community
Based on the intermediate disturbance hypothesis, a community's species diversity is increased by
moderate levels of disturbance
According to the equilibrium model of island biogeography, species richness would be greatest on an island that is
large and close to a mainland
Keystone predators can maintain species diversity in a community if they
prey on the community's dominant species
Food chains are sometimes short because
most of the energy in a trophic level is lost as it passes to the next higher level
Which of the following could qualify as top-down control on a grassland community?
effect of grazing intensity by bison on plant species diversity
The most plausible hypothesis to explain why species richness is higher in tropical than in temperate regions is that
tropical regions generally have more available water and higher levels of solar radiation