Environment & Ecology Mixed Quiz: Set 4

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.

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.

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.

The Invasive Species Specialist Group (ISSG) is one of the expert groups of the IUCN's Species Survival Commission, and it manages the Global Invasive Species Database.

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.

Project Tiger was launched on 1 April 1973 by the Government of India under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, from Jim Corbett National Park in Uttarakhand, to save the Bengal tiger and its habitat.

In a food chain each step at which energy is transferred is a trophic level, and secondary consumers stand at the third step.

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.

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.

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.

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

The Indian Forest Act of 1878 created the three classes of reserved, protected and village forests. British interest in Indian forests grew as the railways and shipbuilding needed huge amounts of timber.

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

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 this food chain grass is the producer, the impala is the herbivore and the hyena is the predator that keeps the impala population in check.

Blue carbon is the carbon stored by marine and coastal ecosystems, especially mangroves, salt marshes and seagrass meadows.

Earthworms, millipedes and woodlice feed on dead plant and animal matter, called detritus, so they are detritivores. Detritivores break dead leaves and bodies into small pieces, which speeds up the work of decomposers such as bacteria and fungi that finish the breakdown and return nutrients to the soil.

Each fig species is pollinated only by its own tiny fig wasp, and the two have evolved together over millions of years.

Rainforest soil is actually poor in nutrients, even though the forest above it is the richest on land. Heat and heavy rain make dead leaves decompose within weeks, and the released nutrients are taken up almost at once by the dense roots and fungi of the trees.

A forest forms and runs on its own, without any human effort, so it is a natural ecosystem.