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6. What is Goldberg and Andrew key idea in Patterns and consequences of interspecific competition in natural communities?

  • Global scale patterns of species distribution: There are three global scale patterns of species distribution.
  • Competition always had significant effects on distribution patterns, on relative abundances, and on diversity, consistent with the notion that competition has strong effects on community structure
  • Reproductive/life strategies: another factor in the patterns and distributions found in ecology relates to the life strategies of species and individuals. These are relayed to elements of the life cycle of s species, specially its means of dispersal
  • Niche: the position or role of an animal or plant species within its community in relation to its specific requirement of habitat resources and microclimate conditions (fundamental and realized)

7. Which is not a key feature of Tudge's, Secret Life of Trees?

  • 3 northerners- aspen and its long lateral roots which send up suckers, grow into new trees. Jack pine- lower branches to shed and die when growing taller so they are burnt in the fire, seed encased. Coastal redwoods re-root themselves as the silt inc
  • Heat light and logistics- plants grow better in warmer places. Individuals can provide new niches for other individuals, eg: trees which have leaves, buds, flowers, fruits, twigs etc.
  • The efficacy of animal seed dispersal to restoration sites can be limited by the degree of isolation from a seed source, absence of animal seed dispersers in the region and by large seed size
  • History- glaciations and climatic variations which caused forests to disappear in the higher latitudes. Influence of greenhouse gases and in particular carbon dioxide

8. Which is not a challenge in Game et al (2012) Pelagic protected areas: the missing dimension in ocean conservation?

  • Physical challenges- The pelagic environment is characterized by physical processes that are highly dynamic in space and time. These include ocean currents, thermal fronts, upwelling and down welling regions and eddies and wind-driven mixing.
  • Governance challenges: Restricting access to such areas presents a substantial governance challenge owing to the fragmented and sectorial management framework common for most offshore regions
  • Future directions: Extensive data on physical, biological and socioeconomic factors can be used in concert with new conservation planning techniques to guide the defensible selection and design of pelagic MPAs
  • Design challenges- Even with broad agreement that well-designed and -located MPAs would be a valuable tool for pelagic management, there are still concerns over a lack of data, methods and tools to enable defensible selection of the best areas
  • Biological challenges- It could be reasonably argued that establishing an MPA over just a small portion of a species’s annual distribution is of limited value, given individuals will remain exposed to threats outside the protected area
  • There is increasing support for marine protected areas (MPAs) as a tool for pelagic conservation. In addition to supplying >80% of the fish consumed by humans, pelagic ecosystems account for nearly half of the photosynthesis on Earth.
  • MPA's versus other conservation strategies: MPAs are just one component of the pelagic conservation landscape, and should be complemented by other forms of management.

9. Which is not a key statement in Jackson's What was natural in the coastal oceans?

  • Overfishing in the 19th century reduced vast beds of oysters in Chesapeake Bay and other estuaries to a few percent of pristine abundances and promoted eutrophication
  • Humans transformed Western Atlantic coastal marine ecosystems before modern ecological investigations began
  • Untold millions of large fishes, sharks, sea turtles, and manatees were removed from the Caribbean in the 17th to 19th centuries
  • Recent collapses of reef corals and seagrasses are due ultimately to losses of these large consumers as much as to more recent changes in climate, eutrophication, or outbreaks of disease.

10. Which is not a key idea from Bjorck's Younger Dryas Osciliation?

  • With respect to the Younger Dryas oscillation, it is likely that a partial shutdown of the Atlantic conveyor belt decreased northern THC, which led to a warming in the Southern Ocean, explaining the early onset of the interglacial warming in south
  • The transitional overlap between northern–southern warming and cooling is reminiscent of the interhemispheric phase lags during the Dansgaard/Oeschger cycles of glacial time
  • Axial wobble which is called the precession of the equinoxes. The gravitational pull exerted by the sun and the moon cause the earth to wobble on its axis
  • It also shows that the Holocene warming began much earlier in the Southern Hemisphere, during the peak of the northern Younger Dryas cooling
  • The present interglacial, the Holocene, was preceded by a distinct cool/dry event in the Northern Hemisphere, generally designated the Younger Dryas cooling, and manifested by a winter dominated climatic signature.

11. Which is not a key feature of Ruddiman's The Anthropocene?

  • Historical data and new archeological databases reveal much greater per-capita land use in preindustrial than in recent centuries. This early forest clearance caused much greater preindustrial greenhousegas emissions and global temperature changes
  • The industrial view holds that most significant impacts have occurred since the early industrial era (∼1850), whereas the earlyanthropogenic view recognizes large impacts thousands of years earlier
  • Humans have altered over 50% of the earth’s surface. The start of this period is seen to be around the 18thC but this is simply because concentrations of several greenhouse gases, such as CO2 and CH4 start a beginning growth.
  • This review focuses on three indices of global-scale human influence: forest clearance (and related land use), emissions of greenhouse gases (CO2 and CH4), and effects on global temperature.

12. Which is not a key idea from Triantis and Bhagwat's Applied Island Biogeography?

  • Nestedness- used to describe the patterns of species composition within continental biotas and among isolated habitats such as islands and landscape fragments
  • Landscape context: matrix effects- the presence of a species within a reserve will depend not only on the suitability of habitat within the reserve, but also on the species ability to use the intervening landscape matrix
  • Emergent guidelines for conservation- MacArthur and Wilson, four key areas that consider the importance for a more successful application of island theory to conservation biogeography
  • Habitat corridors- this is shown by linking larger reserves together, such as forest peninsulas, hedgerows, rivers, roads and railways
  • Species area relationships in conservation- the increase in species number with increasing area
  • Minimum viable populations, minimum areas and incidence functions
  • Metapopulation dynamics- where a particular species occupies geographically separated patches that are interconnected by occasional movements of individuals and gametes.
  • Ecosystem collapse and threshold responses in habitat islands- where the loss of the habitat is so extreme that the immigration into a patch virtually ceases, species richness may collapse
  • Edge effects- where there are two habitats that intermingle, they form a zone of species overlap called an ecotone
  • Biodiversity is scale-dependent; that is, diversity depends strongly on the size of the units used in data collection. Three attributes of scale are particularly important in species richness studies: focus, grain and extent
  • Relaxation and extinction debt- relaxation is where species are lost by extinction and immigration but the population adapts to the new species richness. This time difference is known as the lag time, anticipated species loss is termed the extinction

13. Which is not a signal in Labeyrie's Sub-Milankovitch/D/O and Heinrich Events?

  • Low latitude signals- The best climate information obtained from low latitude records is linked to changes in temperature, precipitation, and monsoon activity
  • Millennial changes in deep and intermediate ocean hydrography- The ocean’s large-scale circulation is a key part of the Earth’s climate system that is directly coupled with atmospheric circulation
  • North-south Linkage- The relation between Greenland and Antarctic temperature change on millennial timescales is perhaps best described as ‘asynchronous’; indeed, the fact that the two climate signals are distinct
  • With respect to the Younger Dryas oscillation, it is likely that a partial shutdown of the Atlantic conveyor belt decreased northern THC, which led to a warming in the Southern Ocean, explaining the early onset of the interglacial warming in south
  • High latitude signals- Each DO cycle represented in the Greenland temperature record has been linked with a large-scale reorganization of the atmospheric circulation around the Northern ice sheets.
  • Mechanisms of millennial climate change: modelling efforts- The rapidly expanding suite of high-resolution paleoclimate records that exhibit millennial-scale variability has provided an enormous stimulus to numerical modelling

14. Which is not a key idea of Field's, Biota and Climate?

  • Heat light and logistics- plants grow better in warmer places. Individuals can provide new niches for other individuals, eg: trees which have leaves, buds, flowers, fruits, twigs etc.
  • The influence of climate on biota- influence of water which is vital for life. Also light for photosynthesis and temperature depending on the blooded nature of the species
  • The influence of biota on climate- soil, hydrogeology, geology and atmospheric composition
  • Species richness- number of species recorded in a specific area, latitudinal diversity gradient
  • Key biotic variable- body size, abundance, range size, growth form, dispersal and phenology

15. Which is not a main idea of Gough and Field's, Latitudinal Diversity Gradients?

  • LDG: decrease in diversity from the equator to the poles, more pronounced today than any other time in the past and is increasing
  • Biodiversity is scale-dependent; that is, diversity depends strongly on the size of the units used in data collection. Three attributes of scale are particularly important in species richness studies: focus, grain and extent
  • Geometric, climatic, energy, temperature and evolutionary hypotheses
  • The influence of biota on climate- soil, hydrogeology, geology and atmospheric composition
  • Biodiversity: concerns the variety of life within and between species and higher taxa

16. Which is not a key feature of Thompson's Ice core evidence for climate change in the Tropics?

  • Hypothesize that the differences in animal resources between the northern and southern Sahara during the early Holocene influenced the way it was peopled by humans
  • Much of the climatic activity of significance to humanity, such as variations in the occurrence and intensity of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation and monsoons, are largely connected to lower latitudes
  • The characteristics of the current warming will be examined and compared to earlier periods of climatic warming such as the transition from the last glacial into the current interglacial as well as other periods within the Holocene.
  • Tropical climate was cooler and more variable during the last glacial cycle and has renewed current interest in the tropical water vapour cycle. The new tropical ice core records raise additional questions about our understanding of the role of the t
  • The tropical and subtropical ice core records may potentially yield long annual to millennial-scale records of El Nin8o-Southern Oscillation events and monsoon variability and thus provide important insights into the magnitude and freq. of events

17. Which is not a key feature of Hulme's Climatic responses?

  • The characteristics of the current warming will be examined and compared to earlier periods of climatic warming such as the transition from the last glacial into the current interglacial as well as other periods within the Holocene.
  • Root cause of the Sahelian desiccation is natural in origin and may lie in the low-frequency and aperiodic response of the coupled ocean atmosphere system to random forcing, perhaps exaggerated in part by the potential for large-scale land cover atmo
  • Annual rainfall across this region fell by between 20 and 30 per cent between the decades leading up to political independence for the Sahelian nations
  • Root cause of the Sahelian desiccation is natural response of the coupled ocean atmosphere system to random forcing, perhaps exaggerated in part by the potential for large-scale land cover atmosphere feedback processes in this vast dryland region.
  • Land cover transformation, partly driven by socio-economic processes in the region, was to blame and that the desiccation might, in principle, be reversible by the pursuit of different land use policies

18. Which is not a key idea of Whittaker et al, A general dynamic theory of oceanic island biogeography?

  • Biodiversity is scale-dependent; that is, diversity depends strongly on the size of the units used in data collection. Three attributes of scale are particularly important in species richness studies: focus, grain and extent
  • MacArthur and Wilson’s dynamic equilibrium model of island biogeography provides a powerful framework for understanding the ecological processes acting on insular populations
  • GDM of oceanic island biogeography providing explanation of biodiversity patterns through describing the relationships between fundamental biogeographical processes – speciation, immigration, extinction – through time and in relation to island
  • GDM can offer the foundation for a newly expanded theory of island biogeography, unifying ecological and evolutionary biogeography.

19. Which is not a feature of Holden's niche, An Introduction to the physical geography and the environment?

  • Reproductive/life strategies: another factor in the patterns and distributions found in ecology relates to the life strategies of species and individuals. These are relayed to elements of the life cycle of s species, specially its means of dispersal
  • Competition always had significant effects on distribution patterns, on relative abundances, and on diversity, consistent with the notion that competition has strong effects on community structure
  • ‘R’ strategies are more likely to be found in new or disturbed sites, since they have a good colonizing ability
  • Interspecific competition arises between other species and the species share the same spatial distribution but not at the same time
  • Niche: the position or role of an animal or plant species within its community in relation to its specific requirement of habitat resources and microclimate conditions (fundamental and realized)
  • Intraspecific competition is within the same species, it may lead to the exclusion of weaker individuals and explain the patterns of territories which control both feeding and reproduction opportunities for the species.
  • ‘K’ strategist, these species are more likely to do well in a less disturbed environment, both stress and disturbance may alter a community.

20. Which is not a key feature of Crutzen and Stoermer's The Anthropocene?

  • The influence of gravitational n-body effects in the Solar System on the geometry of Earth’s orbit around the Sun
  • Without major catastrophes like an enormous volcanic eruption, an unexpected epidemic, a large-scale nuclear war, an asteroid impact, a new ice age, or continued plundering of Earth’s resources by partially still primitive technology mankind stay
  • Man’s activities are seen to be greater of that than the force of nature. The term “noösphere”, the world of thought, to mark the growing role played by mankind’s brainpower and technological talents in shaping its own future
  • Humans have altered over 50% of the earth’s surface. The start of this period is seen to be around the 18thC but this is simply because concentrations of several greenhouse gases, such as CO2 and CH4 start a beginning growth.