Environmental List

The natural environment comprises all naturally-occurring surroundings and conditions in which living things grow and interact on Earth. These include complete landscape units that function as natural systems without major human intervention, as well as plants, animals, rocks, and natural phenomena occurring within their boundaries. They also include non-local or universal natural resources that lack clear-cut boundaries, such as air, water and climate.

The concept of the natural environment can be distinguished by components:

* Complete ecological units that function as natural systems without massive human intervention, including all vegetation, animals, microorganisms, soil, rocks, atmosphere and natural phenomena that occur within their boundaries.

* Universal natural resources and physical phenomena that lack clear-cut boundaries, such as air, water, and climate, as well as energy, radiation, electric charge, and magnetism, not originating from human activity.

As human population numbers increase and as humans continue to evolve, human activity modifies the natural environment at a rapidly increasing rate, producing what is referred to as the built environment. The potential of the natural environment to sustain these anthropogenic changes while continuing to function as an ecosystem is an issue of major worldwide concern. Key environmental areas of interest include climate change, water supply and waste water, air pollution, waste management and hazardous waste, and land use issues such as deforestation, desertification, and urban sprawl.
More about the environment...

... Parts of the physical environment are at risk because they are fragile: natural habitats,
archaeological features and footpaths are but a few of the features under threat from visitor
numbers

natural environment
Although natural environments can help promote health, they also contain a number of
dangers. This study attempted to examine how variations in the physical structure of a simulated
natural environment influenced perceptions of both overall and specific types of danger, ...

natural environment waterpipe smokers
The purpose of this study is to evaluate the variations in exhaled CO and saliva cotinine in natural
environment waterpipe smokers and compare them with cigarette smokers and absolute
nonsmokers. Three groups were included in the study: nonsmokers (n = 20), waterpipe ...

semi-natural environment
Enhanced behavioral complexity may be observed when animals are tested in naturalistic environments
and engaging in nonforced social interactions. For each of six experimental runs, different groups
of five adult Swiss-Webster mice (four ovariectomized females and a single male) were ...

natural abundance
Nitrogen stable isotope ( 15 N, 14 N) natural abundance has been much less used than carbon
isotopes ( 13 C, 12 C) in plant physiology and ecology. Analytical problems, the lower fractional
abundance of 15 N than of 13 C in the biosphere, the greater complexity of the N cycle ...