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The Rare Earth hypothesis argues that planets with complex life, like Earth, are exceptionally rare.. In planetary astronomy and astrobiology, the Rare Earth hypothesis argues that the origin of life and the evolution of biological complexity, such as sexually reproducing, multicellular organisms on Earth, and subsequently human intelligence, required an improbable combination of astrophysical ...
Biogeography now incorporates many different fields including but not limited to physical geography, geology, botany and plant biology, zoology, general biology, and modelling. A biogeographer's main focus is on how the environment and humans affect the distribution of species as well as other manifestations of Life such as species or genetic ...
The Earth has many diverse ecosystems and ecologicalsystem diversity. These are NASA composite images of the Earth: 2001 (left), 2002 (right), titled The Blue Marble. Ecosystem diversity deals with the variations in ecosystems within a geographical location and its overall impact on human existence and the environment.
Forests harbour most of Earth's terrestrial biodiversity. The conservation of the world's biodiversity is thus utterly dependent on the way in which we interact with and use the world's forests. [78] A new method used in 2011, put the total number of species on Earth at 8.7 million, of which 2.1 million were estimated to live in the ocean. [79]
In evolutionary ecology, an ecotype, [note 1] sometimes called ecospecies, describes a genetically distinct geographic variety, population, or race within a species, which is genotypically adapted to specific environmental conditions.
Earth system science – Scientific study of the Earth's spheres and their natural integrated systems; Extraterrestrial life – Life that does not originate on Earth; Information metabolism – Psychological theory of interaction between biological organisms and their environment; Organism – Individual living life form
A biogeographic realm is the broadest biogeographic division of Earth's land surface, based on distributional patterns of terrestrial organisms. They are subdivided into bioregions, which are further subdivided into ecoregions. A biogeographic realm is also known as "ecozone", although that term may also refer to ecoregions.
Speciation is the evolutionary process by which populations evolve to become distinct species.The biologist Orator F. Cook coined the term in 1906 for cladogenesis, the splitting of lineages, as opposed to anagenesis, phyletic evolution within lineages.