Environment & Ecology GK Questions with Answers – Page 40

The German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the word 'Oekologie' in 1866 in his book Generelle Morphologie der Organismen.

It means the layering of an ecosystem from top to bottom, with each layer holding its own set of species.

The Kyoto Protocol, adopted at Kyoto, Japan on 11 December 1997 under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, was the first treaty to set binding targets for cutting emissions.

Statement 1 is true and statement 2 is false. Race to Zero is a global campaign backed by the United Nations and launched in 2020, ahead of the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow.

Green plants are the producers of a terrestrial ecosystem, and NCERT's Class 10 chapter Our Environment states that they capture about 1 percent of the energy of the sunlight that falls on their leaves and convert it into food energy through photosynthesis.

A greenhouse gas is one whose molecules absorb the long-wave infrared radiation given off by the warm surface of the Earth and send part of it back, keeping the planet about 33 degrees Celsius warmer than it would otherwise be.

DDT and mercury compounds are not broken down in the body and are not excreted, so they build up in the tissues of every organism that takes them in and are passed on to whatever eats it.

Gross primary productivity is the total amount of energy that producers fix by photosynthesis. Plants use a part of it for their own respiration, and what remains stored in plant bodies is the net primary productivity.

In a pond the producers are phytoplankton, tiny floating plants whose total weight at any one moment is small. They multiply very rapidly, however, so over time they can feed a far greater mass of zooplankton and fish.

Bears, crows, pigs and human beings eat both plant and animal food, which allows them to occupy more than one trophic level at the same time and makes them a good example of why food webs, rather than single food chains, describe nature better.

Detritus is dead organic matter such as fallen leaves, dead bodies and animal waste. Organisms like earthworms, termites, bacteria and fungi feed on it, and they in turn are eaten by small birds and other animals.

Energy enters an ecosystem as sunlight, is fixed by green plants, and then moves from producers to herbivores, to carnivores and finally to decomposers.

They feed on dead bodies, fallen leaves and waste matter, break the complex organic substances into simple ones and release nutrients back into the soil, water and air, where plants can take them up again.

Energy is lost as heat at every transfer from one trophic level to the next, so a higher level can never hold more energy than the level below it.

It says that only about ten per cent of the energy present at one trophic level is passed on to the next, since the rest is used in respiration and other life processes and is lost to the surroundings as heat.

Green plants make their own food from carbon dioxide and water by photosynthesis, using the energy of sunlight, so they are also called autotrophs.

The British botanist Arthur George Tansley used the word ecosystem in 1935 for a unit in which living organisms and their non-living surroundings are treated together as one system exchanging energy and matter.

Gir in Gujarat is a national park and wildlife sanctuary, famous as the only home of the Asiatic lion, but it has never been declared a biosphere reserve.

International Tiger Day, also called Global Tiger Day, is observed every year on 29 July. It was started in 2010 at the Tiger Summit held in St Petersburg, Russia, where the thirteen tiger-range countries promised to double the number of wild tigers by 2022.

The Seshachalam Biosphere Reserve lies in the Seshachalam hill ranges of the Eastern Ghats in southern Andhra Pradesh, across the old Chittoor and Kadapa districts, and was notified in 2010 as India's 17th biosphere reserve.