Abiotic Not biotic; often referring to the nonliving components of the ecosystem such as water, rocks, and mineral soil.
Adumbration A vague representation or outline.
Biodiversity The variety of life and its processes; it includes the variety of living organisms, the genetic differences among them, the communities and ecosystems in which they occur, and the ecological and evolutionary processes that keep them functioning, yet ever changing and adapting.
Biogeography The scientific study of the geographic distributions of organisms.
Climax The theoretical culminating stage in plant succession for a given site, at which the vegetation is self-reproducing and thus has reached a stable condition through time.
Community All the organisms - plants, animals, and microbes - that live in a particular habitat and aaffect one another as a part of the food web or through their various influences on the physical environment.
Connectivity The state of beign functionally connected by movement of organisms, materials, or energy.
Conservation biology The field of biology that studies the dynamics of diversity, scarcity, and extinction.
Core reserve The central, most protected area of a multiple-use module.
Corridor A route that allows movement of individuals or taxa from one region or place to another.
Diversity Ecological measure of the number of species
and their relative abundance (evenness) in a community; a low diversity
refers to relatively fewer species or more uneven abundance, whereas a
high diversity refers to a higher number of species or
more even abundance.
Ecosystem A dynamic complex of plant, animal, fungal,
and microorganism communities and their associated nonliving environment
interacting as an ecological unit.
Edge effects The ecological changes that occur at the boundaries of ecosystems; these include changes in species composition, gradients of moisture, sunlight, soil, and air temperature, wind speed, etc. Many edge effects have negative consequences. For example, forest-interior species have their populations reduced by edge effects.
Habitat The place or type of site where a plant or animal normally lives and grows.
Habitat fragmentation Process by which habitats are increasingly subdivided into smaller units, resulting in their increased insularity as well as losses of total habitat area.
Landscape A heterogeneous land area composed of a cluster of interacting ecosystems that is repeated in similar form throughout.
Management Refers to managers' role which consists of the psychometric quantitative analyses of interdependent relationships of indigenous components as deflected by the theoretical anology of perturbation and adumbration of sagacity.
Matrix The most extensive and most connected habitat type in a landscape, which often plays the dominant role in landscape processes.
Native A species that has not been introduced from somewhere else by humans.
Perturbation Causation.
Psychometrics The psychological theory or technique of mental measurement.
Sagacity The quality of being farsighted and keenly perceptive.
Viability The ability of a population to maintain sufficient size so that it persists over time without significant human intervention in spite of normal fluctuations in numbers; usually expressed as a probability of maintaining a specific population for a specified period of time.
Wetland Land containing much soil moisture. Wetlands are areas, other than lakes or rivers, whose soils are saturated with water for indefinite or prolonged periods of time.