Download WRL reference M01 D02 Module M01 Ecosystems – Coral Reefs

WRL reference
M01 D02
Module
M01 Ecosystems – Coral Reefs
Data set
D02 Variation in habitat quality between two Indonesian coral reefs
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Glossary of terms used:
Definition sources: OCR – GCE glossary; Cambridge International Examinations; On-Line Biology
Book; Oxford Dictionary; Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Autotrophy: The process of making food using simple organic molecules, such as carbon dioxide and
water, and energy. Photoautotrophs (plants, some protoctists and some bacteria) use light as the
source of energy.
Benthic: Another word for the seabed. A benthic community is therefore the collection of organisms
living on the sea bottom.
Coral bleaching: The whitening of corals due to a loss of their symbiotic algae caused by stress.
Corallite: The calcium carbonate skeleton of a single coral polyp. Collections of polyps and their
corallites form larger colonies.
Community: All the populations of different species that live in the same place at the same time, and
who can interact with each other.
Ecosystem: All the living organisms and all the non-living components in a specific habitat, and their
interactions.
Error bars: Bars added to graphs to indicate the variability of data (typically standard error or
standard deviation).
Habitat: The place where an organism or population of organisms lives.
Heterotrophy: The process of gaining nutrients from complex organic molecules. It digests them to
simpler, soluble molecules and then respires some of them to obtain energy, or uses the projects of
digestion to synthesise the organic molecules needed. Heterotrophs are consumers in food chains.
Indicator species: A species which is a good indicator of the living conditions in a particular habitat.
Scientists can then use these species as a simple way of monitoring for changes in habitat.
Morphology: The form and structure of an organism.
Polyp: The basic unit of a coral. A coral polyp is a single coral individual, which often live in groups
known as colonies.
Regression analysis: This is a statistical test used when investigating the relationship between two
variables. Often you only wish to see whether the two variables are correlated (i.e. does increasing
Operation Wallacea | www.opwall.com | [email protected]
These data were gathered from the Opwall Indonesia expedition: http://opwall.com/sixth-form-high-school/locations/indonesia-schoolexpeditions/ Copyright: these resources are the sole property of Operation Wallacea although they may be used freely for educational purposes within
the classroom or for internal examinations. Further use will require permission which can be gained by email.
one cause the other to increase) and you would use a Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. In
this case study we want to know if one variable can be used to predict the value of the other and we
have used a linear regression analysis.
Soft coral: A group of corals that don’t produce a calcium carbonate skeleton and so don’t
contribute to the formation of coral reefs.
Standard deviation: A measure of how much data varies from the mean or average. The more
spread the data is, the higher the standard deviation.
Standard error: A measure of how accurate/reliable the mean of a data set is. Although similar to
the standard deviation, standard error also takes into account the number of replicates/samples
used (the fewer samples taken the less reliable the mean and therefore the higher the standard
error).
Video Transects: The use of transects to collect data, where the transects are filmed and the footage
analysed later instead of data being collected directly from the transects.
Operation Wallacea | www.opwall.com | [email protected]
These data were gathered from the Opwall Indonesia expedition: http://opwall.com/sixth-form-high-school/locations/indonesia-schoolexpeditions/ Copyright: these resources are the sole property of Operation Wallacea although they may be used freely for educational purposes within
the classroom or for internal examinations. Further use will require permission which can be gained by email.