Environment & Ecology GK Questions with Answers – Page 17

Sunlight reaching a glasshouse is mostly visible light and short-wavelength (near) infrared, which glass transmits easily. The plants and soil inside absorb it, warm up and re-radiate the energy as long-wavelength infrared, because cooler bodies emit at longer wavelengths.

INDCs were the climate pledges countries announced before the Paris climate conference of 2015. Under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, each country was asked to state what it intended to do to cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change after 2020.

G. Evelyn Hutchinson distinguished the fundamental niche, which is the full range of conditions and resources a species could use if nothing interfered, from the realised niche, which is the narrower part left to it once competitors, predators, parasites and disease are at work.

A keystone species holds the structure of its community together out of all proportion to its own numbers, exactly as the keystone at the top of an arch holds the stones in place.

Where conditions stay constant and the resource is limiting, the better competitor increases while the weaker one dies out or shifts its niche.

A lichen is a partnership of an alga and a fungus that takes its water and minerals straight from the air, having no protective cuticle and no roots.

Paine introduced the term in 1969 after an experiment on the rocky Pacific shore in which he removed the starfish Pisaster ochraceus from study plots.

An ecotone is the zone where two adjoining ecosystems meet and blend, such as the mangrove belt between land and sea, an estuary between a river and the ocean, or the strip where grassland gives way to forest.

Oceans cover close to seventy-one per cent of the earth's surface and hold about ninety-seven per cent of its water, which makes the marine ecosystem the largest on the planet by both area and volume.

An artificial or man-made ecosystem is one that people create and keep going by their own effort, deciding which species live in it and supplying water, nutrients and protection.

Abiotic components are the non-living parts of an ecosystem, and soil belongs squarely to that list along with sunlight, temperature, water, air, minerals and pH.

An ecosystem is a working unit in which a community of living organisms interacts with the non-living surroundings in a given area, so it must contain both halves.

Founded in 1883, it is India's oldest conservation body, it works from Mumbai, and besides the popular magazine Hornbill it publishes a scientific journal and runs long-running bird and wildlife surveys; Salim Ali, the country's best known ornithologist, was associated with it for decades.

It was signed on 2 February 1971 in the Iranian city of Ramsar, which is why the treaty is always called the Ramsar Convention and why 2 February is kept as World Wetlands Day.

The Convention on Biological Diversity was opened for signature at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and came into force in 1993; its secretariat works from Montreal, and its two protocols are the Cartagena Protocol on biosafety and the Nagoya Protocol on access to genetic resources and the fair sharing…

The IPCC was created in 1988 so that governments would have an authoritative, regularly updated assessment of climate science; its secretariat is at Geneva, and it shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.

WWF has published the Living Planet Report since the late 1990s, and its central measure, the Living Planet Index, tracks the average change in the size of monitored vertebrate populations.

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species was begun in 1964 and is the accepted global inventory of the conservation status of plants and animals.

IUCN was set up in 1948 at a conference held at Fontainebleau and was then called the International Union for the Protection of Nature; its headquarters later settled at Gland in Switzerland.

UNEP was created in 1972 after the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, and the decision to place it at Nairobi made it the first major United Nations programme headquartered in a developing country, a point examiners repeat often.