Jessie+M


 * The Living World Vocabulary**


 * Species:** A grouping of similar organisms that can reproduce sexually among themselves, but that cannot produce fertile offspring when mating with other organisms.
 * Population**: A group of individuals of the same species occupying the same area.
 * Biological Community:** the populations of plants, animals, and microorganisms living and interacting in an area at a certain given time.
 * Ecosystem**: A specific biological community and its physical environment interacting in an exchange of energy and matter.
 * Producers**: An organism that synthesizes food from inorganic compounds by using an external energy source, such as light from the sun.
 * Productivity:** The synthesis of new organic material.
 * Biomass**: the total mass or weight of all of the living organisms in an area.
 * Detritivores**: organisms that consume organic litter, debris and dung.
 * Food Chain:** A linked feeding series.
 * Food Web:** A complex, interlocking, series of individual food chains in an ecosystem.
 * Trophic Level:** A step in the movement of energy through an ecosystem, or an organisms feeding status within the ecosystem.
 * Consumer:** An organism that obtains food and nutrients by feeding on another organism.
 * Herbivores**: An organism that only eats plants.
 * Carnivores**: An organism that mainly preys upon animals.
 * Omnivores**: An organism that eats both plants and animals.
 * Scavengers**: An organism that feeds on the dead bodies of other organisms.
 * Decomposer:** Fungi and bacteria that break complex organic material into smaller molecules.
 * Primary Productivity:** synthesis of biomass by green plants using the energy captured in photosynthesis.
 * Abundance**: The number or amount of something.
 * Diversity**: the number of species present in a community, as well as the abundance of each species.
 * Complexity:** the number of species at each trophic level and the number of trophic levels in an ecosystem.
 * Edge Effects:** A change in a species physical characteristics or composition at the boundaries between two ecosystems.
 * Random Distribution**: When organisms live randomly in their environment.
 * Uniform Distribution:** When organisms live together, uniformly in their environment.
 * Clustered Distribution**: When organisms live in uniform clusters in their environment.
 * Ecotones**: A boundary between two types of ecological communities.
 * Climax Community:** a relatively stable, long lasting community reached in the successional series.
 * Primary Succession:** An ecological succession that begins where no previous biotic factors existed in the recent past.
 * Secondary Succession**: Succession on a site where previous life has recently existed.
 * Pioneer Species**: the first species to occupy an area during primary succession such as lichen.
 * Disturbance:** Periodic, destructive events such as a fire or flood; changes in an ecosystem that negatively or positively affect the organisms living there.
 * Disturbance-Adapted Species**: species that depend on disturbances to survive.
 * Tropical Forest:** characterized by high species complexity and diversity, as well as a lot of rainfall and high humidity.
 * Tropical Savanna and Grassland:** the wet season of a grassland and savanna.
 * Deserts:** characterized by low moisture levels and infrequent and unpredictable precipitation. Daily and seasonal temperatures fluctuate.
 * Temperate Grasslands:** characterized by rich grasses, fertile lands, some rainfall and generally cool weather.
 * Temperate Shrublands:** characterized by hot and dry in the summer as well as cool and wet in the winter. Many shrubs.
 * Temperate Forests:** Deciduous and Coniferous
 * Boreal Forests:** A broad band of mixed coniferous and deciduous trees that stretch across northern North America, Europe, and Asia.
 * Tundra:** Treeless arctic or alpine biome characterized by harsh winters, a short growing season, and potential for frost any time of the year; perennial lichen, plants, mosses.
 * Biome**: A broad, regional type of ecosystem characterized by a distinctive climate and soil conditions and a distinctive kind of biological community adapted to those conditions.
 * Vertical Zonation**: terrestrial vegetation zones determined by altitude.
 * Cloud Forests**: high mountain forests where temperatures are uniformly cool and fog and mist form easily and keeps vegetation wet all of the time.
 * Tropical Seasonal Forests**: semievergreen or partly deciduous forests tending toward open woodlands and grassy savannas dotted with scattered drought resistant plant species; distinct wet and dry seasons; hot year round.
 * Grasslands:** dominated by grasses and associated herbaceous plants.
 * Savannas:** open grasslands with sparse tree cove.
 * Chaparral:** Thick, dense, thorny evergreen scrub found in Mediterranean climates.
 * Deciduous**: trees and shrubs that shed their leaves at the end of the growing season.
 * Coniferous:** needle bearing trees that produce their seeds in cones.
 * Taiga:** the northernmost edge of the boreal forests including species poor woodland and peat deposits integrating with the arctic tundra.
 * Wetlands**: ecosystems of several types that in which rooted vegetation is surrounded by standing water during part of the year.
 * Estuaries**: a bay or drowned valley where a river empties into a sea.
 * Coral Reefs**: prominent oceanic features composed of hard, limy skeletons produced by coral animals; usually formed upon edges of shallow, submerged ocean banks or along shelves in warm, shallow, tropical seas.
 * Phytoplankton:** microscopic, free floating, autotrophic organisms that function as producers in aquatic ecosystems.
 * Benthic:** the bottom of a sea or lake.
 * Pelagic:** zones in the vertical water column of a body of water.
 * Coral Bleaching:** whitening of coral reefs caused by expulsion of symbiotic algae. Often resulting from high water temperatures or pollution or disease.
 * Mangroves**: trees from a number of genera that live in salt water.
 * Salt Marshes**: shallow wetlands along the coastlines that are regularly flooded with seawater.
 * Tide Pools:** depressions in a rocky shoreline that are flooded at high tide but are cut off from the ocean at low tide.
 * Barrier Islands:** Low, narrow, sandy islands that form an offshore coastline.
 * Thermocline**: A distinctive temperature transition zone that separates an upper layer that is mixed by the wind and a colder, deeper area that is not.
 * Swamps:** wetlands with trees.
 * Marshes:** a wetland without trees. In North America this is characterized by cattails.
 * Bogs:** an area of waterlogged soil that tends to be peaty; fed mainly by precipitation; low productivity; some are acidic.
 * Fens:** An area of waterlogged soil that tends to be peaty; fed mainly by upwelling water; low productivity.
 * Chemosynthesis:** the process in which inorganic materials such as hydrogen sulfide or hydrogen gas serve as an energy source for synthesis of organic materials.
 * Photosynthesis**: the biochemical process by which green plants and some bacteria capture light energy and use it to produce chemical bonds.
 * Chlorophyll**: the green pigment found in plants. Located in the chloroplast.
 * Adaptation:** the acquisition of traits that allow a species to survive and thrive in its environment.
 * Natural Selection**: the mechanism for evolutionary change in which environmental pressures cause certain genetic combinations in populations to become more abundant.
 * Selection Pressures**: factors in an environment that favor successful reproduction of individuals possessing heritable traits that reduce viability and fertility of those individuals that do not possess those traits.
 * Tolerance Limits:** chemical and physical factors that limit the existence, growth and abundance or distribution of an organism.
 * Indicators**: A species whose critical tolerance limits can be used to judge the environmental conditions.
 * Habitat**: the place or set of environmental conditions in which an organism lives.
 * Ecological Niche**: the functional role and position of a species or population within a community or ecosystem including what resources are used, how and when it used these resources as well as how it interacts with other populations.
 * Competitive Exclusion Principle:** a theory that states that no two populations of a different species can occupy the same space at the same time and that they will compete for these resources and one will be excluded.
 * Resource Partitioning**: when various populations in a biological community share the same space and resources so they must partition them in order to eliminate competition.
 * Speciation**: the generation of a new species.
 * Geographic Isolation**: when species arise from a common ancestor due to geographic barriers that cause reproductive isolation.
 * Allopatric speciation:** when species arise from a common ancestor due to geographic barriers that cause reproductive isolation.
 * Sympatric Speciation:** species that arise from a common ancestor due to biological or behavioral barriers that causes reproductive isolation even though they share the same environment.
 * Binomials**: two part names that are usually genus and species and are in Latin to show taxonomic relationships.
 * Intraspecific Competition**: in a biological community, competition for resources among members of the same species.
 * Interspecific Competition:** in a biological community, competition for resources among members of a different species.
 * Predator-Mediated Competition**: a situation in which predation reduces prey populations and gives advantages to competitors that might not be otherwise successful.
 * Coevolution:** the process in which the species exert selective pressures upon each other and gradually evolve new traits as a result of those pressures.
 * Batesian Mimicry:** evolution by one species to resemble the coloration, body shape or behavior of another predator that is protected from predation due to a stinger, bad smell, or some other defensive adaptation.
 * Müllerian Mimicry**: evolution of two species to resemble each other when both have some kind of defense mechanism.
 * Symbiosis**: the intimate living together of two different species.
 * Mutualism:** when two species both benefit from each other.
 * Commensalism:** when one species benefits and the other isn’t harmed or benefited.
 * Parasitism:** when one species is harmed and the other benefits.

10.5 Presentation

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Ecological Restoration Project: The Puget Sound Nearshore



First and foremost, The Puget Sound Nearshore is the coastal area in Washington State extending from the Canadian border to Neah Bay. It includes bluffs, beaches, mudflats, kelp and eelgrass beds, salt marshes, gravel spits, and estuaries, and for this reason the ecological state of the area is very important. The area’s health has been jeopardized from pollution, resulting in contaminated shellfish and the habitat destruction of many aquatic life forms. The degradation of this ecosystem is not only dangerous to the marine life, but to the people who depend on that life as well. Nine out of ten of the endangered species in The Puget Sound region inhabit The Nearshore, and pollution is causing lesions and tumors in many of the mammals in the area. Development in the area (suburban and urban) has destroyed many of the critical habitats along the shoreline. Three of the most prominent issues are the limited food and nutrients for the aquatic life, altering the surface flows of the groundwater, and deteriorating beach sediment movement.



In September of 2001 PSNERP (Puget Sound Nearshore Restoration Project) was created as a general investigation to assess the issues within the Puget Sound Nearshore and come up with a feasible plan of action to fix said problems. The direct quote for this is as follows: **“…evaluate significant ecosystem degradation in the Puget Sound Basin; to formulate, evaluate, and screen potential solutions to these problems; and to recommend a series of actions and projects that have a federal interest and are supported by a local entity willing to provide the necessary items of local cooperation.”** This is not only an issue for the environment, but the economy of the Nearshore as well. The Nearshore focuses on the shellfish and salmon industry, and if the habitats are destroyed, then the economy of the Northwest as a whole will suffer. In addition to the economy, the recreational activities in The Nearshore that attracts tourists depended on the health of the region as well.





This is a huge endeavor, one of the largest ever undertaken in the United States. Many different tribes, industries, environmental organizations, communities, and government organizations are coming together to tackle this project to repair the damage done to the area and preserve it for many years to come. The first phase of this project has been federally funded and consists of gathering specific information on the area, collecting data, and deciding what exactly needs to be done to fix the problems that they come across. The second phase is projected to cost billions of dollars to ultimately restore and preserve the Puget Sound Nearshore. In significance, this project is up there with the Chesapeake Bay and Everglades restoration projects. They are currently in the studying phase of the project, where geological and other scientific teams are going into The Nearshore and trying to figure out what is causing the pollution, coming up with ideas to solve the problem, and ultimately devising a plan of action to continue the project.



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