California Ecosystems final study guide

Final study guide -- check after Thursday talks for updates

Here are items to look up in your notes, the course home page, labs, and readings. If you recognize all of them, you should be fine going into the final. As with the midterm, this exam is open-everything: books (Rundell and Gustafson), lecture notes, labs, all the links on the course home page, and, if all else fails, your favorite Internet search engine. As some of you discovered in the midterm, this doesn't mean you can blow off studying! Print this study guide and annotate it with notes about where you can find information on each item so you have something to cling to in the stress of the final. I will do a revision after the group presentations, so you should print the extra questions then, too.

Be sure to read Rundel and Gustafson chapters 6 (Woodlands), 7 (Grasslands), 8 (Riparian Woodlands), 9 (Wetlands), 10 (Channel Islands), 11 (Invasive Species), and 12 (Preserving Diodiversity). I've drawn one or two questions from each.
Also, go back over Labs 7 (PigeonWatch Chi-square) and the team field project talks (interpreting calculated vs. critical statistics, p-values vs. alpha, effect sizes, and power).
Also, please go over all the groups' presentation viewgraphs, which will be linked off the main page. Each group will find a question pertaining to their findings.
As with the midterm, please bring an 882 Scantron, soft pencil (#2 or softer), and a sheet of paper in case you need more space on your short answers or problem/essay than provided on the exam itself (blue/"green" books NOT necessary).

Study guide:

How you can use Calflora to build a species list for a study area and then identify species you find in the field.
Statistics
- Alternate hypotheses vs. null hypotheses (which one is logically testable?)
- Type I and Type II errors
  - Alpha is the tolerable risk of which error? (1-α=confidence level)
  - Beta is the tolerable risk of which error? (1-β=power)
- How do you know if your results are significantly different or significantly associated? How would you judge significance using:
  - Calculated statistics vs. critical statistics
  - p-values vs. alpha
- Effect sizes
  - What are they? How are they different from significance?
  - What are the common ball-park ranges used for strong, moderate, weak, trivial effects?
- A finding of no significant difference or no significant association generally means exactly that, but it could also imply something else may have happened that weakened your study's ability to detect a given effect if it actually exists. What is that?
- Be sure to know how to use and interpret the output from the Chi-squared calculation spreadsheets
Woodlands
- Besides oak species, what other trees can be found in California non-riparian woodlands?
- Where are the various types of woodlands found?
- What are some threats to California oak species?
Riparian woodlands
- What does "riparian" mean?
- Which tree species are common in riparian situations?
- How is a riparian environment structured in terms of the plant life forms encountered there? There's a sequence of dominant life forms as you move from the water into drier ground away from the stream.
Grasslands/California prairies
- What were the California grasslands like before the arrival of Europeans? How can we even know?
- What is the basic difference between Frederick Clements' description of the original grasslands and Richard Minnich's?
- How do the Mediterranean annual grasses outcompete California shrubs/subshrubs/forbs and California grasses?
- Which tree species are sometimes found in groves in the grasslands, forming a kind of tree-studded savanna?
- All California ecosystems are challenged by exotic, sometimes invasive species, but one of these ecosystems is a standout in terms of how thoroughly native species have been displaced by exotics: Which one is that? Hint: Which section is this bullet point sitting in? ;-)
- Be able to recognize and name the four or five most common exotic annual grass species in our area and the (fewer) common native perennial bunchgrasses.
Wetlands
- What is a wetland?
- What are the three basic types of wetland worldwide?
- What are the three marshland types found (sometimes rarely) in Southern California?
- To which subtype of coastal wetlands does the local Bolsa Chica belong?
- How do lagoons, such as Malibu Lagoon, differ from other river mouth estuaries, such as the one at the mouth of the Ventura River?
- Be able to relate the four common zones in and around a coastal wetland in terms of their relations to high and low tides and how often they are submerged or exposed daily: subtidal, intertidal, supratidal, and upland
- What are the two common ways that coastal wetland plants cope with salt toxicity?
- Freshwater marshes have been badly impacted by development in Southern California. In which kinds of environments were they likely to develop (before suburbia)?
- What are vernal ponds (sometimes called vernal pools)? Where are the only ones left found in Southern California?
Deserts
- What are the four basic global climate types that contain desert vegetation?
- What are California examples of each of these four climate types of desert?
- There is obviously pretty intense moisture stress for desert plants, so the stakes for competition are very high. What are two common ways that they compete with one another for access to water?
- How else do desert plants cope with moisture stress?
- What are the three types of photosynthesis and which ones are more commonly seen in desert plants than in less "thirsty" situations?
- What does the desert look like?
  - What's usually the dominant life form?
  - What are other life forms often seen in deserts in particular circumstances?
  - What is a biological soil crust, what ecosystem services does it provide, and what sorts of challenges does it face?
  - There are essentially bare surfaces in deserts. What are two common types of bare surfaces?
Invasive species and trying to preserve biodiversity:
- Why is the spread of exotic species so problematic worldwide?
- How do exotics get introduced all over the world?
- Where did most of the common invasive exotic species in Southern California come from?
- What is probably the most aggressive exotic invader of riparian stream banks and why is it so bad?
- Are all exotic species by definition invasive?
- Many invasive species share a weedy character, which makes them take over which kinds of sites?
- What is allelopathy? Which local invasive is particularly likely to use it?
- What is it about the way Southern California urbanization/suburbanization developed that makes it particularly dangerous to native animal and plant species trying to coëxist with us?
Channel Islands:
- Miniaturization vs. gigantism: Which is more common among the plant species on these islands?
- What is island endemism?
Project PigeonWatch:
- What is sexual selection (which can act against physical survival)? How would natural selection maintain a bizarre gender feature in one sex if it actually hurts an individual's lifespan?
- With the PigeonWatch data you worked with in Lab 7, we got supporting results in which of the three working hypotheses (morphs by physical environment, females courted vs. females available, males courting females similar to or different from themselves)?
- Which working hypothesis had no support (we had to keep the null hypothesis)? Why might the "no significant difference" results have happened, especially since the other two working hypotheses were significant?
- With the full 21 year database used by teams Zeta and Delta this semester, what happened with the working hypothesis that there is some kind of natural selection pressure creating different mixes of pigeon morphs in different kinds of habitats?
- What happened with the working hypothesis that sexual selection (assortative mating preferences) might vary among courting males of different morphs?
- Be sure to know how to use and interpret the output from the Chi-squared calculation spreadsheet
Recovery from wildfire in the Sepulveda Dam Basin
- Be able to compare and contrast 2019 (immediately post fire) and 2021 in terms of the varying recovery of soil conditions and coastal sage scrub at the Sepulveda Dam Basin
- How significant are these changes?
- How "dramatic" are the effect sizes?
Recovery from wildfire in Charmlee Park
- The expanding northern part of the East Meadow CSS "lump" showed a significant difference in species mix before and after the Woolsey Fire. Which species increased from past to present and which were newly recorded species by Team Alpha?
- The stable southern part of the CSS "lump" very strikingly showed the persistence of what even three years out from the Woolsey Fire in the work of Team Beta?
- The middle section of the CSS "lump" showed the arrival of a new non-native and invasive species in the work of Team Gamma. What was that disconcertingly abundant new arrival?

GEOG/ES&P 330