BIOLOGY 1B Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Rain Shadow, Cool Air, Dew Point
Document Summary
Thinking by isolating areas of an environment is partially artificial and unrealistic but is the only way to begin to understand systems. Temporal / spatial scope: how we delimit a system for study. Resoultion: what components we focus on within a system. Attempt to falsify each hypothesis, or to evaluate its relative importance. Holistic approaches: understanding how the temporal and spatial context affect the behavior of the system. Variation in temperature and precipitation = affects distributions of biomes. Adiabatic cooling: as a parcel of air rises, it experiences lower atmospheric pressure, expands in volume, and cools. If it cools below the dew point, the air will condense as clouds or rain. Warm air = bigger holding capacity for water. Tropics = where the air loses all its water. Biome: have characteristic vegetation types, but are not necessarily related taxa (caused be convergent evolution)
