Ecology, Biomes & Conservation Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the global inventory that judges how close each assessed species is to dying out and files it under a category from Least Concern through Vulnerable, Endangered and Critically Endangered to Extinct in the Wild and Extinct, and is used to steer conservation effort and money worldwide?

Question 2

What is the name for a species whose need for a large, varied area of habitat is so great that setting aside enough land to keep it safe automatically shelters a whole host of other species living in the same place; the tiger, the grizzly bear and the northern spotted owl are used this way?

Question 3

What is the name for the international agreement, in force since 1975, that controls or forbids the movement across borders of listed wild animals and plants, alive or dead, and of products made from them, covering everything from elephant ivory and rhino horn to wild orchids, corals and rare tropical timbers?

Question 4

What is the name for the attempt to bring back a vanished species, or a close approximation of it, by cloning from preserved tissue, by breeding back from living relatives that still carry pieces of its heritage, or by editing those relatives' genes; the woolly mammoth, the passenger pigeon and the thylacine are named targets?

Question 5

What is the name for the chain of knock-on effects that spreads down through a food web when a top predator is removed or brought back, as when the loss of wolves let elk overgraze the young willows of Yellowstone and the beavers and songbirds that needed them declined, a decline reversed after wolves returned in 1995?

Question 6

What is the name for the repeating, linked rise and fall in the numbers of a hunter and its main food, each peak and crash of one following a beat behind the other, the classic record being the roughly ten-year swings of the Canada lynx and the snowshoe hare read from old fur-trade ledgers?

Question 7

Which ornithologist, widely called the 'Birdman of India', carried out systematic surveys of the birds of the subcontinent's regions and princely states, wrote the standard popular field guide, and used his standing to campaign successfully for the protection of wetlands and forests?

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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.