Today is 20 April 2008 -- Ecology Study Plan

Your next assessment is in about four or five weeks.  It will cover ecology and evolution.  I want you to have the opportunity to study for this assessment so I am going to defer the study of genetics until after the assessment.  Taking the topics out of the original order in which they were in will not harm your study.  Genetics and heredity are certainly factors in ecology and evolution, but we do not need to study inheritance to understand them.  (See standard 7, below, for example.)  For your convenience I have listed the standards for ecology.  Please make sure you write the standards in your notebooks:

Ecology

 Stability in an ecosystem is a balance between competing effects. As a basis for understanding this concept:

1.  Students know biodiversity is the sum total of different kinds of organisms and is affected by alterations of habitats.

2.  Students know how to analyze changes in an ecosystem resulting from changes in climate, human activity, introduction of nonnative species, or changes in population size.

3.  Students know how fluctuations in population size in an ecosystem are determined by the relative rates of birth, immigration, emigration, and death.

4.  Students know how water, carbon, and nitrogen cycle between abiotic resources and organic matter in the ecosystem and how oxygen cycles through photosynthesis and respiration.

5.  Students know a vital part of an ecosystem is the stability of its producers and decomposers.

6.  Students know at each link in a food web some energy is stored in newly made structures but much energy is dissipated into the environment as heat. This dissipation may be represented in an energy pyramid.

7.  * Students know how to distinguish between the accommodation of an individual organism to its environment and the gradual adaptation of a lineage of organisms through genetic change.

Here is a schedule of how we can proceed with our study:

Monday, 21 April --

1.  (Copy standards during roll-taking.)

2.  Watch the power point presentation

3.  Break into Groups

4.  Follow the assignment on power point

5.  complete the homework assignment tonight.

Tuesday, 22 April

1.  Meet in the Quad

2.  Idenfity and count organisms in different areas of the school

Wednesday, 23 April

1.  Invasive plant video clip

2.  Causes of fluctuations in population sizes

3.  Analysis of counting

Thursday, 24 April

1.  Energy flows in ecosystems -- Sect. 13.3 in text

2.  Food web, food chain

Friday, 25 April

1.  Quiz

2.  Element recycling; water cycle