Levels of Organisation

Cards (7)

  • Photosynthetic organisms are the producers of biomass for life on earth
  • feeding relationships within a community can be presented by food chains
  • All food chains begin with a producer which synthesises molecules
  • The start of a food chain is usually a green plant or alga which makes glucose by photosynthesis
  • A range of experimental methods using transects and quadrants are used by scientists to determine the distribution and abundance of species in an ecosystem
  • Producers are eaten by primary consumers, which in turn may be eaten by secondary consumers and then tertiary consumers.
  • Using quadrats:
    1. place a 1m^2 quadrat on the ground at a random point within the first sample area
    2. you could do this by dividing the area into a grid and using a random number generator to pick coordinates
    3. count all organisms within the quadrat
    4. repeat steps 1-3 as many times as possible
    5. work out the mean number of organisms in the first sample area
    6. repeat steps 1-5 in the second sample area