Activity 2.3 – Biosphere and Interconnections

 

This concept map depicts the different units of energy and how they relate to the energy sources and producers in the environment. Specifically where the energy is created and how the energy moves throughout the ecosystem to different organisms. 

This concept map shows the different groups within biodiversity, which relates to the categories and different classifications of organisms in our ecosystem. This helps categorize each organism into different sections so we can understand where it originated from and what it is. 

This concept map depicts the different natural biomes and the categories they originated with and what specific area the different biomes exist within the plant, animal, or microorganism group. 

       Beginning with the first concept map, which contains information on energy in ecosystems. Autotrophs are more so the basic origin of energy in the ecosystem. It is the producer of the main external energy source and then other consumers retrieve that energy. Photoautotrophs are the most common, which use sunlight as their main source of external energy. Energy in ecosystems acts similarly to a food chain. The energy throughout the ecosystem gets absorbed and later transferred to a different consumer which restarts the whole process over. 

       This then leads us to ecozones and the different natural biomes. Ecosystems that are human-dominated contain an environment where plants and animals are somewhat "domesticated" to humans. The plants and animals adapt to the constant surrounding of human life. Then other biomes like freshwater and marine are less likely to have as much human interaction. Not that it's completely avoidable, but surely not as bad. The energy in all of these biomes, especially the water biomes. are high due to all of the little microorganisms in the water. These bring more energy from the sunlight and then produce it into fuel for the fish, which then goes to birds, and so on. Biomes contain so much energy for life, which is why it's important for mankind to be educated about our environment. 

       This is where biodiversity and classification make their way into the topic. The classification of organisms has been around for hundreds of years. Majority of the classification terms are in Latin, which proves that they have been around for some time. (Academy, 2021) Being able to classify each type of organism and its origin is important to humans for research, teaching, and other educational and research purposes so not only can we understand our environment, but so as humans discover more organisms in the future, we can classify it into the category it belongs in. Having a better understanding of our environment shows that we can keep the ecosystem growing and working smoothly with evolution. (Freedman, 2018)

References

Freedman, B. (2018). Environmental Science: A Canadian perspective. DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES DIGITAL EDITIONS.

Academy, E. (n.d.). How to Write Scientific Names of Plant and Animal Species in Journal Manuscripts (Part 1). Enago Academy. https://www.enago.com/academy/how-to-write-scientific-names-in-a-research-paper-animals-plants/#:~:text=We%20have%20seven%20classifications%20within,the%20designations%20are%20in%20Latin.