some of my collected notes: not guaranteed to be accurate

• Chemoreception: Ability to perceive chemical signals
• Phytoncide: volatile compounds, healthy for breathing
• anthropocentric co-occurence: where humans have transformed how plants and animals relate
• Aposematism: signaling towards predators
• Gynandromorph: bisexually divided animal
• Phylogeny: evolutionary history of a species
• Trophotraxis: Physical adaptation to food sources
• Davis' law: how tissue forms along imposed demands

• Foundation species: grass
• Indicator species: Chernobyl animals
• Keystone species: High impact relative to its biomass.
• Flagship species: species that humans find intriguing
• Casual Species: alien species unable to form self-replacing population but relying on continual reintroduction
• Colonizing Species
• Sentinel species: organisms, often animals, used to detect risks to humans by providing advance warning of a danger
• We have never been individuals

• Climate Niche
• Nutrient-Sensitive Landscapes
• Target Ecosystem
• Myth of Balance in Nature: Adam Curtis: Arthur Tansley: It all started with a dream. One night in the 1920s botanist Arthur Tansley had an unsettling nightmare that involved him shooting his wife. So he did the natural thing and started reading the works of Sigmund Freud, and even went to be analysed by Freud himself. Then Tansley came up with an extraordinary theory. He took Freud's idea that the human brain is like an electrical machine – a network around which energy flowed – and argued that the same thing was true in nature. That underneath the bewildering complexity of the natural world were interconnected systems around which energy also flowed. He coined a name for them. He called them ecosystems. But Tansley went further. He said that the world was composed at every level of systems, and what's more, all these systems had a natural desire to stabilise themselves. He grandly called it “the great universal law of equilibrium”. Everything, he wrote, from the human mind to nature to even human societies – all are tending towards a natural state of equilibrium. Tansley admitted he had no real evidence for this. And what he was really doing was taking an engineering concept of systems and networks and projecting it on to the natural world, turning nature into a machine. But the idea, and the term “ecosystem”, stuck. Adam Curtis, in the Observer, may 2011
• Systems Ecology: Steppe grasslands project: George van Dyne
• Ethology: study of animal behavior
• Ethogram: a catalogue or inventory of behaviours or actions exhibited by an animal

• Taxon richness: Amount of species found
• Taxonomic diversity: One type of chicken, cactus and otter (4) ≠ Four types of Chicken (4)
• Feature diversity: Richness in functions and behaviours
• Allodiversity: The amount of species introduced by man, human activity
• Endemism: only occurring locally (is a crude approximation of)
• Phenotypic Diversity:
• Phenotypic Plasticity:
• Species Distribution:
• Dark Biodiversity: trace biodiversity that is invisible to science: lives and dies at densities below our capacity to see it
• Speciation: Allopatric Speciation: through geographic isolation

• Biodiversity Loss:
• Species Extinction: indicating biodiversity loss by extinct species hides the enormous decline in individuals or biomass
• Mass Extinction: examining the drop in the total number of animals, capturing also the plight of the world’s most common creatures