Worth 2% of your final grade, this assignment is due 11:59 pm, Sunday, Nov 4, 2022
Answer the following questions and submit this document to the course website.
Goals:
1. Understand relationship between species distribution and abiotic environment.
2. Explore treeline positions and ecosystem characteristics in different climate zones.
3. Describe an ecosystem that you are familiar with.
Exercise Ecosystems
An ecosystem is a geographic area where plants, animals, and other organisms, as well as
weather and landscape, work together to form a bubble of life. Ecosystems contain biotic or
living, parts, as well as abiotic factors, or nonliving parts. Biotic factors include plants, animals,
and other organisms. Abiotic factors include rocks, temperature, and humidity.
Every factor in an ecosystem depends on every other factor, either directly or indirectly. A
change in the temperature of an ecosystem will often affect what plants will grow there, for
instance. Animals that depend on plants for food and shelter will have to adapt to the changes,
move to another ecosystem, or perish.
Ecosystems can be very large or very small. Tide pools, the ponds left by the ocean as the tide
goes out, are complete, tiny ecosystems. Tide pools contain seaweed, a kind of algae, which uses
photosynthesis to create food. Herbivores such as abalone eat the seaweed. Carnivores such as
sea stars eat other animals in the tide pool, such as clams or mussels. Tide pools depend on the
changing level of ocean water. Some organisms, such as seaweed, thrive in an aquatic
environment, when the tide is in and the pool is full. Other organisms, such as hermit crabs,
cannot live underwater and depend on the shallow pools left by low tides. In this way, the biotic
parts of the ecosystem depend on abiotic factors.
The whole surface of Earth is a series of connected ecosystems. Ecosystems are often connected
in a larger biome. Biomes are large sections of land, sea, or atmosphere. Forests, ponds, reefs,
and tundra are all types of biomes, for example. They’re organized very generally, based on the
types of plants and animals that live in them. Within each forest, each pond, each reef, or each
section of tundra, you’ll find many different ecosystems. (National Geography)
Choose an ecosystem that you are familiar with, find an example of this type of ecosystem on
Google Earth, and answer the following questions. You must use your own words.
Submit your answers ONLY in a separate file to D2L. Do not include above text in your file )t
will make your Turnitin score extremely high.
1. Where is it located? (longitude, latitude, elevation) (0.5 point)
2. What is the climate in this location? (Such as mean monthly temperature, precipitation,
etc) (0.5 point)
3. Briefly describe the community features, such as diversity, dominant species, canopy,
animals, soil conditions or anything you would like to share. (1 point)
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