Ecology

• Ecology is the study of the relationship between living things to one another
• Community + habitat = ecosystem
• Community is the living things/species inside an ecosystem
• Habitat is an environment where things live
• Same species can breed successfully - that's what makes them a species
• Carbon dioxide concentration:

  • raw materials
  • more carBon
• Why is not all energy passed from the sun to the producer?


  Some light will miss the pant or chloroplasts. some light is reflected by the cuticle. Some light has wrong wavelength to be absorbed by chlorophyll
• what's a primary consumer?


  An organism which eats the producer
• The benefit of using a pyramid of biomass

  It is a more accurate way of looking at relative amounts of organisms
• what's a pyramid of biomass?

  A diagram which shows the total mass of organisms
• What are trophic levels?

  stages in a food chain or web
• What's a food web?


  A diagram that shows all the food chains linked together - helps understand the links between communities
• Give 4 reasons why only about 10% of energy transferred from one trophic level to the next?

  • some parts of the organism is not eaten
  • some parts are not digested or absorbed
  • egested as feces
  • some materials are respired to release energy - used for movement and to maintain body temperature
• Abiotic factor

  A non-living factor. e.g. light intensity
• Biotic factor

  a living factor
• Biomass

  the mass of living tissues of one animal or plant species is made up of
• What is this called?

  Pyramid of biomass

  
• How would you sue a transect (Quadrats)?


  Place quadrat at regular intervals along the transect and measure the percentage cover or number of individuals
• How do you use a Quadrat?


  1. Get quadrats
  2. use a random number generator on Siri to find coordinates for sampling
  3. count the number of organisms
  4. repeat
  5. calculate average and multiple up for a whole area
• What's an ecosystem?

  system or area where organisms interact with their physical environment
• What are decomposers?


  organisms which secrete digestive enzymes to decay (break down) dead organic matter to obtain their food e.g. fungi and bacteria