Sections
Key Terms
Key Terms
- adaptive radiation
- rapid branching through speciation of a phylogenetic tree into many closely related species
- biodiversity
- variety of a biological system, typically conceived as the number of species, but also applying to genes, biochemistry, and ecosystems
- biodiversity hotspot
- concept originated by Norman Myers to describe a geographical region with a large number of endemic species and a large percentage of degraded habitat
- bush meat
- wild-caught animal used as food (typically mammals, birds, and reptiles); usually referring to hunting in the tropics of sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and the Americas
- chemical diversity
- variety of metabolic compounds in an ecosystem
- chytridiomycosis
- disease of amphibians caused by the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis; thought to be a major cause of the global amphibian decline
- DNA barcoding
- molecular genetic method for identifying a unique genetic sequence to associate with a species
- ecosystem diversity
- variety of ecosystems
- endemic species
- species native to one place
- exotic species
- (also, invasive species) species that has been introduced to an ecosystem in which it did not evolve
- extinction
- disappearance of a species from Earth; local extinction is the disappearance of a species from a region
- extinction rate
- number of species becoming extinct over time, sometimes defined as extinctions per million species–years to make numbers manageable (E/MSY)
- genetic diversity
- variety of genes in a species or other taxonomic group or ecosystem, the term can refer to allelic diversity or genome-wide diversity
- heterogeneity
- number of ecological niches
- megafauna
- large animals
- secondary plant compound
- compound produced as byproducts of plant metabolic processes that is usually toxic, but is sequestered by the plant to defend against herbivores
- species-area relationship
- relationship between area surveyed and number of species encountered; typically measured by incrementally increasing the area of a survey and determining the cumulative numbers of species
- tragedy of the commons
- economic principle that resources held in common will inevitably be overexploited
- white-nose syndrome
- disease of cave-hibernating bats in the eastern United States and Canada associated with the fungus Geomyces destructans