1. ECOSYSTEMS

2. What is missing from this food chain?
detritivores

3. In what way is this food web more realistic than the food chain?
The food web incorporates consumers that feed at multiple trophic levels

4. Primary Producers
Who are the primary producers of most terrestrial ecosystems?
Plants
Who are the primary producers of most aquatic ecosystems?
Microscopic algae and bacteria (phytoplankton), and multicellular algae and aquatic plants.

5. Consumers Herbivores - primary consumers
Carnivores - secondary consumers
Omnivores - can feed at multiple trophic levels

6. Decomposers
What organisms are decomposers in most ecosystems?
Fungi and Bacteria
What do the decomposers do?

7. The energy budget of an ecosystem depends on its primary productivity.
What is gross primary productivity? (GPP)

8. GPP represents energy available
to consumers in an ecosystem.

9. What is Net Primary Productivity? (NPP)
NPP = GPP - R

10. Net Primary Productivity
Why is NPP a more useful measurement than GPP?

11. How is it that the open ocean has low net productivity yet accounts for most of the Earth’s total productivity?

12. Limiting Factors
What sort of factors will limit productivity?
Light intensity
Water
Inorganic nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus.
CO2

13. Energy Partitioning Within the Food Chain
What does this number represent?

14. Energy Partitioning Within the Food Chain
The energy available for the next trophic level.

15. Ecological Efficiency
How much of energy is actually available to the next trophic level?
Usually around 10% is available
Why is it that we don’t see 6th order consumers?

16. Which has more energy, a quarter pound of salad or a quarter pound of beef ?

17. How can the producers in the English Channel support the producers in this ecosystem?

18. How many individuals are supported at the top level of this ecosystem?

19. Chemical Cycling

20. Biogeochemical Cycles – the way
in which elements, chemical compounds, and other forms of matter are passed from one organism to another and
throughout the biosphere.

23. (conversion to
organic forms)

25. What does the loss of nitrates from the deforested ecosystem tell you about the water, and about how nitrates are normally maintained in the ecosystem?

26. What is going on in this picture?

27. We’ve Changed Our Tune

28. The Experimental Eutrophication of a Lake

29. Erosion of Earth’s Ozone Shield: The Ozone Hole Over the Antarctic

30. Erosion of Earth’s ozone shield: Thickness of the ozone layer