Ecosystems and material cycles

• Ecology is when all organisms have relationships
• Habitat is a place where an organism lives
• Population is all of the organisms of a particular species that live in the same habitat
• Community is all the populations of different species that live together in a habitat
• Competition is when an organism needs a range if resources so they have to compete in order to get them
• interdependence is when all the species depend on other species in the same way
• Resources animals need to survive: space , food , water , mates
• Resources plants need to survive: light, space, water, mineral ions
• Biotic factors are living factors that affect another organism or shape ecosystems in some way
• Abiotic factors are non-living parts of the enviromeant that can affect organism (chemical and physical)
• Examples of biotic factors: predation , competition for resources, amount of disease, availability of food
• Examples of abiotic factors: light intensity, carbon dioxide concentration, wind intensity, temperature, moisture levels, mineral content in soil
• Abundance - how many organisms there are
• Distribution - where the organisms are
• Sampling - The process of selecting a subset of the population to be studied and use them to make predictions on the whole population
• Quadrats - square frames, which are a type of sampling. They measure the abudance.
• Transects - type of sampling. It’s a line place next to the quadrats that runs through a natural landscape to make measurements.
• Food chains - show what gets eaten by what in an ecosystem
• Producers - primary consumers - secondary consumers - tertiary consumers
• As the energy passes up the food chain some of it gets lost
• Tropic levels - levels within a food chain
• Apex predators - carnivores at the top of the food chain that have no predators
• Decomposers and detritivores help decompose dead plant and animal matter back into the environment
• Efficiency - biomass transferred to the next level divided by biomass available at the previous level x100
• Biodiversity - variety of different species on earth or within an ecosystem
• maintaining a high standard of biodiversity is important to make ecosystems stable and to help us to produce medical drugs
• Damaging the environment - reduces biodiversity
• the waste we generate makes its way into the air, water and land
• Water can be polluted by sewage from our houses which can hurt animals
• Landfill and nuclear waste generate toxic chemicals which can hurt insects in the ground
• Fossil fuels and combustion can release sulphur dioxide which can harm animals directly
• Fertilisers - substance applied to soil , on order to supply plants with nutrients
• Fertilisers are used to : replace lost nutrients, crops take in nutrients from soil in order to grow when crops are harvethe nutrients are removed and do not return to the soil, nutrients are lost when livestock are killed , animals absorb nutrients from plants they eat , if they are killed nutrients can’t return to the soil through their urine
• Npk fertilisers are made of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium
• Fertilisers can negatively impact waterways through leaching and eutrophication
• Leaching occurs when nutrients in fertilisers are washed out of the soil by water (rain)
• Fertilisers sometimes provide plants which too much nutrients leading to leaching
• Leached nutrients often wash into waterways such as rivers, lakes
• Eutrophication is caused by excess nutrients that have been leached into waterways
• Excessive algae blocks sunlight from reaching other organisms causing them to die off