Environment & Ecology GK Questions with Answers – Page 38

The convention was adopted in 1971 in the Iranian city of Ramsar, from which it takes its name, and it provides for the listing of wetlands of international importance and for their wise use by the countries that sign it.

The Wildlife (Protection) Act provides the legal basis for declaring national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, lists protected species in its schedules, and prohibits hunting and trade in the species it covers.

The core zone is legally protected and left undisturbed, with no human activity allowed. The buffer zone around it permits research, education and limited use of resources that does not damage the core.

It spreads across the meeting point of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka in the Western Ghats and takes in several well known national parks and sanctuaries within its area.

The Convention has three objectives: the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components, and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the use of genetic resources.

They are a broken and comparatively dry hill chain and do not meet the twin tests of exceptional endemism and severe threat that define a hotspot.

A region qualifies when it is exceptionally rich in species found nowhere else and has already lost most of its original vegetation.

Tamil Nadu is the first state in India to make rooftop rainwater harvesting structures compulsory for all houses and buildings across the state, through a law brought in 2003.

It is India's first national park, set up in 1936 as Hailey National Park, in the Nainital area of present-day Uttarakhand.

NTU stands for Nephelometric Turbidity Unit. A nephelometer shines a beam of light through a water sample and measures how much of it is scattered sideways by suspended particles such as clay, silt, algae and microbes; the more the scattering, the more turbid, or cloudy, the water is.

In the sea the producers are tiny phytoplankton. At any given moment their total mass is smaller than the mass of the zooplankton and fish that feed on them, so the pyramid of biomass stands upside down.

Itai-itai disease is long-term cadmium poisoning, first noticed around 1912 in the Toyama region of Japan, where mines upstream released cadmium into the Jinzu river and it built up in the rice and water used by villagers.

Nokrek Biosphere Reserve is in the Garo Hills of Meghalaya; Manas is in Assam along the Bhutan border; Similipal is in Mayurbhanj district of Odisha; and Seshachalam lies in the Eastern Ghats of Andhra Pradesh.

The Red Data Book is the source book that keeps a record of endangered animals, plants and fungi, so that governments and conservationists know which living species face the greatest risk of dying out.

Corbett National Park in Uttarakhand is India's oldest national park; it was set up in 1936 as Hailey National Park and in 1973 became the first reserve under Project Tiger.

Producers, the green plants and algae, are the most numerous living part of an ecosystem because every other organism depends on them for food.

In 2018 the Union Environment Ministry started a pilot project to clean up and develop selected beaches so that they could win the Blue Flag.

Kanha Tiger Reserve lies in the Mandla and Balaghat districts of Madhya Pradesh, in the Maikal hills at the eastern end of the Satpura range.

Polythene is a synthetic plastic that bacteria and fungi cannot break down, so it is non-biodegradable. A plastic bag can stay in soil or water for hundreds of years.

Rain with a pH below 5.6 is called acid rain. Even clean rain is slightly acidic, with a pH of about 5.6, because carbon dioxide from the air dissolves in it to form weak carbonic acid; that is why 5.6, not 7, is the dividing line.