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