Environmental Biology – In this chapter you learn:
1. Factors that affect an area’s ability to support life.
2. How change in the environment might affect organisms.
3. The structure of an ecosystem.
4. How habitat destruction leads to loss of biodiversity.
5. Roles of producers, consumers and decomposer in the ecosystem.
6. The concept of tropic levels.
7. Food chains and food webs.
8. The movement of energy through an ecosystem.
9. Ecological pyramids and their relationship to energy flow in an ecosystem.
10. The water cycle, the nitrogen cycle and the carbon cycle.
11. Predator- prey, host-parasite and symbiotic relationship and their effects on populations.
12. The concept of ecosystem balance, and how humans are affecting this balance.
Everything that surrounds and organism is its environment. An organism’s environment, which is a complex of many physical and biological factors, provides every the organism needs in order to live. The environment provides food, water, air, and other resources. If conditions in the environment change, the organism may not be able to survive.
In any environment living organisms show complex relationships among themselves and with their non-living or physical environment. Ecology is the study of the relationships of living organisms with each other and their non-living or physical surroundings.
Ecology deals with distribution and abundance of life on earth, ecological roles of specific species, and interaction among species in communities, maintenance roles of specific species, interaction among species in communities, maintenance of ecosystems and environmental degradation.