Unit 1

• Ecosystems are the interaction of living and non-living things in a specific region.
• Environment refers to the entire natural world.
• A habitat is the given environmental conditions that a certain species needs in order to survive.
• Symbiosis refers to any organisms that live in close proximity to each other.
• Mutualism is a relationship where both species benefit.
• Biomes are regions on earth that share a consistent yearly average temperature and precipitation pattern.
• Terrestrial biome refers to the biome that is located on land.
• Aquatic biome refers to the biome that is located in water.
• Tertiary consumers, also called apex predators, are preying on secondary and primary consumers for their energy source.
• Food webs and food chains are a simple topic if you can keep one rule straight: the arrows in a food web or a food chain show the movement of energy and matter.
• The removal of one species can have a huge effect on the organisms in the rest of the food web, especially on either side of it.
• The shape of the pyramid is key to understanding how energy flows through ecosystems.
• Each level in the pyramid only receives 10 percent of the energy from the level below because the organisms at the level below use up a ton of that energy for cellular respiration.
• Large predators like eagles and wolves require a lot of space in order to get the amount of energy they need because there needs to be a thousand times as much plant biomass within that ecosystem for them.
• The 10 rule states that primary consumers only receive 10 percent of the energy from the producer level, secondary consumers only receive one percent of the energy from the producer level, and tertiary consumers or top predators only receive 0.1 of the energy from the producer level.
• Top predators like wolves and hawks often control the herbivore populations in their ecosystems, which results in an increase at the producer level in those ecosystems.
• Producers or plants are at the base of the pyramid because they have access to the largest amount of energy and they produce energy directly from the sun.
• Secondary consumers are getting their energy by eating primary consumers that ate plants.
• The law of conservation of matter states that matter is never created or destroyed, only changing forms.
• Reservoirs are things that temporarily store matter, sources are processes that move matter between reservoirs, and sinks are reservoirs that take in increasing amounts of matter over time.
• Aquatic biomes are influenced by temperature and precipitation, with three other factors being salinity level, flow, and depth.
• The carbon cycle is the first cycle we'll look at, with sources of carbon returning carbon in the atmosphere and carbon sinks taking carbon out of the atmosphere.
• The amount of time carbon spends in its reservoirs varies a lot and is crucial to global climate.
• Photosynthesis is a crucial step in the carbon cycle as it's the process of plants taking carbon out of the atmosphere and converting it into biological molecules like glucose or starch or other plant tissues.
• The salinity level or saltiness of an aquatic biome is crucial as the plants and animals that live there need to be adapted to the dehydrating effects of salt.
• Estuaries are a unique category of aquatic biomes where the mouth of a river empties out into the ocean, with a unique salinity level and high plant biodiversity that supports high animal biodiversity.
• Trees of the tropical rainforest get up and move somewhere else if temperature and precipitation patterns are changed, expanding the tropics away from the equator as global temperature rises.
• If plants are long-lived, they can become carbon sinks, lowering the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
• Flow in aquatic biomes is important as it disrupts the surface which allows oxygen to diffuse into the water and carries sediments and nutrients.
• The atmosphere is a critical carbon reservoir as the amount of carbon it stores at any given time determines earth's global climate.
• The primary consumers or the herbivores are getting their energy by eating the plants.
• The secondary consumers or the carnivores are getting their energy by eating the primary consumers.
• The world's largest freshwater reservoirs are also the least accessible, which are the ice stored at the north pole and the south pole and in the world's glaciers.
• The ocean is the major water reservoir on earth, but the water is not usable for humans for things like drinking or for agriculture.
• Primary productivity is the rate at which the producers or plants in the area are taking sunlight and converting that energy into glucose or other forms of organic matter.
• Gross primary productivity is the total amount of energy that plants produce, while net primary productivity is the amount of energy that plants can actually store after they've given up what they need to for cellular respiration.
• A trophic pyramid is a way to represent the way that energy flows through an ecosystem from organism to organism.
• Most of the energy that plants produce never actually makes it to the next step in the food chain.
• Water cycles through the earth due to the sun's energy.
• Primary productivity is the production of energy over a certain amount of time.