Bringing the Urban Environment Into the Classroom: Learning From an Estuarine Mesocosm
Glossary
- Abiotic
- Nonliving chemical and physical parameters in an environment.
- Allopatric speciation
- The formation of new species from ancestral species as a result of geographical separation or fragmentation of a breeding population.
- Anthropogenic
- Resulting from human activity.
- Bilaterian
- Bilaterally symmetrical organism, with body parts arranged in two halves that are mirror images of one another.
- Biotic
- Pertaining to the living organisms in an environment.
- Biomass
- The total mass of living organisms, commonly of those in a particular population or ecosystem.
- Biophilia
- A word coined by Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson to describe the deep need that people have for natural habitats and species; the love of nature.
- Estuarine
- Present in an estuary, an area where a freshwater river meets seawater and is subject to tidal fluctuations and fluctuations in salinity.
- Eutrophication
- Process by which bodies of water age and become more productive. Anthropogenic eutrophication can lead to algal blooms and deoxygenation.
- Formative assessment
- All those activities undertaken by teachers and/or their students that provide information to be used as feedback to modify and improve the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged.
- Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium
- The law or principle that states that in an infinitely large, interbreeding population in which mating is random and there is no selection, migration, and mutation, gene frequencies will remain the same between the sexes and constant from generation to generation, with no overlap between generations.
- Homeostasis
- State in which the internal processes of an organism tend to remain balanced and stable.
- Interspecific competition
- Competition between species.
- Macroinvertebrate
- Invertebrate animal large enough to be seen without a microscope.
- Mesocosm
- A biological system used for conducting experiments.
- Niche partitioning
- The coexistence of two or more species that partition one or more resources in a habitat.
- Radially symmetrical
- With body parts arranged symmetrically around a central axis.
- Summative assessment
- The process of evaluating (and grading) the learning of students at a particular point in time.