Ecology, Biomes & Conservation Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the Red List category for a species that no longer exists in a free-living population anywhere but survives only in zoos, botanic gardens or seed stores, or as an introduced population well outside its natural range; Pere David's deer and the scimitar-horned oryx were long in this bracket?

Question 2

Which biome, with hot dry summers and mild wet winters, is covered by dense, low, hard-leaved, aromatic evergreen shrubs adapted to burn and resprout, and is found around one sea and in four far-flung regions with the same climate: California, central Chile, the Cape of South Africa and south-western Australia?

Question 3

What is the name for the deliberate moving of a species to an area outside its historical range that is expected to suit it better as the climate warms, a debated last resort for species, such as some slow-spreading trees and mountaintop animals, that cannot shift fast enough on their own?

Question 4

What is the name for the pattern of a population that grows quickly when it is small but slows as it nears the limit its environment can support, so that its numbers trace an S-shaped curve that flattens out where births and deaths come into balance?

Question 5

Which biome is a tropical landscape of scattered, flat-topped, drought- and fire-resistant trees standing over a continuous carpet of grass, with a sharp division of the year into a wet and a dry season, and it supports the great grazing herds and their predators?

Question 6

What is the name for a very large category of community recognised by its overall look and its climate, such as tundra, grassland, hot desert or tropical forest, which recurs on different continents wherever the climate is similar, even though the actual species present are different?

Question 7

Which reserve, on the flood plain of the Brahmaputra river in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam, protects roughly two-thirds of the world's greater one-horned rhinoceroses, along with tigers, elephants and wild water buffalo, and is patrolled by armed guards against poachers?

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About Ecology, Biomes & Conservation

This quiz is about how living things fit together and how people try to keep the living world intact: the building blocks of ecology, the world's great biomes and the cycles of carbon, water and phosphorus, the way populations grow and communities recover from disturbance, and the threats, tools, laws and people of conservation. One hundred questions in five packs, each describing an idea, a biome, a process, a threat, a tool or a figure and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it. It is a knowledge quiz, not a picture quiz.

The first pack is ecology's foundations: the ecosystem, habitat and niche, the food web and the feeding levels, producers and decomposers, the ten per cent rule, keystone species and trophic cascades, apex predators, competitive exclusion, mutualism and commensalism, succession and its pioneers, carrying capacity, the limiting factor, productivity and biodiversity.

The second pack is biomes and cycles: the tundra, the savanna, the temperate grassland, the desert, the temperate deciduous forest, the Mediterranean shrubland, wetlands, estuaries and coral reefs, then the carbon, water and phosphorus cycles, eutrophication, permafrost, the greenhouse effect, the idea of a biome, the ecotone, the rain shadow, the alpine zone and the deep sea.

The third pack is populations and disturbance: exponential and levelling-off growth, the predator-prey cycle, crowding-linked and crowding-blind checks, the fast-breeding and the slow-breeding life strategies, succession from bare rock and from disturbed ground, the climax community, disturbance itself, fire-dependent country, invasive species, island biogeography, fragmentation, the edge effect, corridors, mesopredator release, reintroduction and rewilding.

The fourth pack is conservation on the ground: the Red List and its categories, the wildlife-trade treaty, habitat loss and the illegal trade, the pangolin, the flagship, umbrella and indicator species, the national park, the biodiversity hotspot, and an Indian block, Project Tiger, Kaziranga, the one-horned rhino, the Asiatic lion, the vulture crisis and Salim Ali, plus captive breeding and ecosystem services.

The fifth pack is the big picture: the Gaia hypothesis, the tragedy of the commons, the ecological footprint, Silent Spring, the land ethic, E. O. Wilson, the Rio biodiversity treaty, the sixth mass extinction, defaunation, shifting baselines, ocean acidification, dead zones, microplastics, the ivory and whaling bans, assisted migration, de-extinction, the Anthropocene, the Living Planet Index and the 30 by 30 target.

The wrong answers are always other ideas, biomes, threats, tools or people of the same kind. About a quarter of the questions carry a neutral photograph of a forest path, a wetland, a meadow or someone using binoculars, chosen because it names no answer and so cannot point to any option. Facts have been checked against standard reference works.