- Industry: Biology
- Number of terms: 15386
- Number of blossaries: 0
- Company Profile:
Terrapsychology is a word coined by Craig Chalquist to describe deep, systematic, trans-empirical approaches to encountering the presence, soul, or "voice" of places and things: what the ancients knew as their resident genius loci or indwelling spirit. This perspective emerged from sustained ...
Saprophytic (decay-fed), spore-making plants without chlorophyll: rusts, molds, smuts, mildews, mushrooms, and yeasts. Their long hyphae filaments aerate and bind soils, aid water transport, cycle nutrients, decompose organic matter, and allow roots to absorb nutrients from the ground.
Industry:Biology
Pesticides, fertilizers, wastes, erosion dust, runoff from fields, and animal infections are a few of the varieties. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, half the water pollution in the U. S. Is agricultural. (Most of the other half is industrial. )
Industry:Biology
Average atmospheric conditions over a long time interval. Energy from the sun drives climate, which sets limits on a biome's plant life and therefore on the animals that live there. The Koppen-Geiger classification sorts major climates into five types: humid tropical, dry, humid warm, humid cold, and cold polar.
Industry:Biology
Using the same soil to grow different crops. Interrupts cycles of weeds, diseases, and insects; builds organic matter, improves soil structure. Useful rotations: nutrient-grabbing crops like corn, celery, and potatoes with those that need less, like garlic, mustard, or shallots; and shallow-rooting crops with deep ones. (Soil improvers: broad beans, lima beans, peanuts, peas, shell beans, snap beans, soybeans. )
Industry:Biology
From the Greek oikos (household) and logos (study): the study of interrelationships between organisms and their environment. The term was coined in 1866 by German biologist and philosopher Ernest Haeckel, famous also for his discredited but interesting dictum that ontogeny (individual physical development) recapitulates phylogeny (the evolutionary development of its species).
Industry:Biology
Body divisibility into mirror-image halves (right and left arms and legs, for example). Animals with bilateral symmetry display dorsal (top), ventral (bottom), anterior (front), and posterior (rear) orientations, whereas radial animals like starfish have only the dorsal and ventral. (Arms, legs, and wings evolved from the fins of lungfish swimming around over 400 million years ago. )
Industry:Biology
An organelle (although outside the cell nucleus) that power the cell by converting organic matter into ATP (energy)--see Carbohydrate Catabolism. Mitochondria also regulate bodily heat and refine the oxygen that would otherwise poison us. They look like upturned pillbugs.
Industry:Biology
Masanobu Fukuoka's method for letting roots till the soil instead of machines. Decrease cultivation and you decrease weeds. Leguminous cover crops and mulching instead of fertilizer. Fukuoka practices what he calls the "no-plowing, no-fertilizing, no-weeding, no-pesticides, do-nothing method of natural farming. " To him the idea that people can grow crops is egocentric, for it is nature that grows crops. His rice yields have been impressive. (He reads like kind of a nut: lots of “man in his arrogance” soliloquizing reminiscent of Roger Payne in the seventies. )
Industry:Biology
A catastrophic reduction in species population. The mass extinction now underway threatens more than half the animals on Earth, some of whom have already vanished; others, like the great apes, are about to. For a tribute to what no longer lives, see the Altars of Extinction project online.
Industry:Biology
The force that pushes an orbiting object out of its circular path. "Force" is a misnomer, however, because without the centripetal force, the object would naturally straighten its course in accordance with Newton's First Law of Motion, which states that objects tend to move in a straight line through space unless acted upon by an outside force.
Industry:Biology
