Kipp Hughes 214128788

SLE103 Ecology and the Environment

9am Friday
Tutor: Pearl Dang


















Introduction:
Ecosystems are a community of biotic organisms and abiotic components working together
to create a system, or more simply living things in the environment interacting with non-
living things to create what we call an ecosystem. Ecosystems are vital in the role of
recycling nitrogen and other chemicals needed to sustain life on earth and thus need to be
studied for us to get a better understanding of how our world works. The study of
ecosystems in todays society is important for educating leaders and the general public of
how our environment works and ways to avoid the destruction of our ecosystems and
hence the planet. This experiment aims to study a particular ecosystem, I have chosen a
forest ecosystem in the Dandenong Ranges, the exercise sets out to study the biotic parts of
the ecosystem and how they interact with abiotic components and also the energy flow of
the system.
Method:
Figure 1: The red box shows the general area which the experiments took place in (taken from Google Maps)
On the 11
th
of May 2014 at 10:34am my little brother and I chose an area in our local
ecosystem to study with 4 pegs and a tape measure, we found a flat area of ground for the
first bit of data we collected called Area 1, we measured out a 1x1 meter bit of the ground
and placed pegs in the four corners, we then took note of different species of plants that we
found in the 1x1 area and if we didnt know the name of a plant we used descriptive words
to differentiate it from other species of plant in the same family (ie Thin Creeper, Thick
Creeper), after recording every different species of plant in the 1x1 quadrat we doubled the
area to a 2x1 quadrat and recorded any new species of plant but didnt rerecord the plants
that we had already found in the 1x1 quadrat, after writing down all of the new species in
the 2x1 quadrat we again doubled the area to a 2x2 quadrat and repeated the steps of
taking down notes, we kept doubling the size this way until we had an 8x4 quadrat. After
recording all the data and putting it into a table we picked another random point in the
ecosystem to repeat the experiment on, Area 2 was located about 40 meters west of Area
1s 1x1 quadrat on a west facing incline and repeated all the steps we did in Area 1.
Figure 2: the first image is of the slope that Area 2 was located on, and the second is of a patch of ground
inside Area 1 (photos taken by Kipp Hughes)
Results:
Biotic components of the ecosystem:
The results from the two identical experiments were place in a table (see Table 1)
Table 1: the species found and what quadrat they first appeared in
The results from the Table 1 were put into a graph to show the species-area relationship
that can be seen in Figure 3 the graphs roughly take the shape of a logarithmic equation
Figure 3: the figure shows the relationship between the number of different species in areas of increasing size
Discussion:
Biotic components of the ecosystem:
The results of the experiments showed an increase in the number of species found in an
area as the sample area became larger, both the Areas showed the same trend in that as
the area size increased the number of different species increased even though the species
found in Area 1 were not identical to the species found in Area 2 but as the sample area got
even larger the number of different species plateaued. The trend lines in Figure 3 follow
what is roughly a logarithmic graph or even possibly a square root function but are more
likely a function with a horizontal asymptote because there would be a point at which no
new species can be found at a certain time in the ecosystem. By reading off the Figure 3 we
can interpolate to predict what the density of species would be if the sample area was 20m
2
, the number of unique species in a sample area of 20m
2
in Area 1 and Area 2 would be
between roughly 13 species.
Interactions between biotic and abiotic components of the ecosystem:
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35
N
u
m
b
e
r

o
f

S
p
e
c
i
e
s

Area (meters square)
Species-Area Relationship
Area 1
Area 2
In the ecosystem I chose there was an abundance of evidence for animal life, during the
experiment we came across snake and wombat holes, and also leafs with bite marks from
what could have been caterpillars. In an ecosystem biotic organisms rely on other biotic
organisms for survival but they also rely on the abiotic components of the ecosystem to
create an inhabitable environment, abiotic components of the ecosystem such as water
availability, temperature, altitude, and the richness of the soil can affect the types of biotic
organisms that can thrive and survive in that particular ecosystem. Living organisms can also
affect and change the abiotic environment over time, animal faeces can enhance the
richness of soils, and also humans can destroy entire ecosystems for profit.
Energy flow in the ecosystem:
Most ecosystems including the one my experiment was conducted in get their energy from
the sun, primary producers are the givers of energy to the ecosystem, in the ecosystem I
studied the primary producers are the eucalypts and the thin ground creeper species, they
Figure 4: a visual representation of the energy flow and consumption of the ecosystem
take the energy from the sun and convert it into chemical energy in which the primary
consumer consumes, the primary consumer is next step along the food chain, small insects
or mammals that are herbivores, they obtain most of their energy by consuming the primary
producers of the ecosystem, the primary consumers of my chosen ecosystem are worms,
and small insects, they eat any leaf litter left on the ground from tall eucalypts and the leafs
off small herbs and trees, a secondary consumer is a creature that gets its nutrients and
energy from consuming the primary consumer of the ecosystem, the secondary consumers
of my ecosystem where native birds and small rodent like creatures such as the kookaburra,
and while I saw no tertiary consumers while out running the experiment I did find evidence
of tertiary consumers in the ecosystem, the tertiary consumers I found evidence for in the
ecosystem were snakes, the snakes have a diet of the small rodent secondary consumers,
the reason I found no tertiary consumers while out in the experiment was due to the fact
that tertiary consumers appear in low densities in the ecosystem to maintain a balance in
energy, if too many tertiary consumers were present in the ecosystem then there would not
be enough secondary consumers to complete the chain and there would be an imbalance,
this is why tertiary consumers are not always visible in an ecosystem because of such low
numbers.
Chemical cycling in the ecosystem:
In ecosystems the soil must contain certain chemicals to allow plants to grow in it, when the
plants grow they use up some of these chemicals and since energy cannot be created or
destroyed and matter is condensed energy the chemicals that make up the plants in the
ecosystem must be recycled back into the soil which it came from, in the ecosystem I
studied there was a large amount of leaf litter on the ground, also fallen branches and even
entire trees, they were all at different stages of decomposing, some of the trees were still a
solid wood that you could stand on others you could push your thumb through. Animals can
also contribute to the chemical cycling in the ecosystem the decomposition of animal
carcasses are vital for returning much need nitrogen to the soil, but its not only their dead
remains that decompose into the earth, animal faeces can return chemicals to the soil after
being used up by the animals digestive system. Worms and other insects that live in the soil
help breakdown layers of leaf litter, from first glance the leaf litter on the top appears to not
be decomposing but that is only because it has freshly fallen from the trees above, but if you
scratch the surface theres a sort of brown sludge underneath which is all the leaf litter that
is in the process of decomposing and it being helped along by the worms crawling around in
it. When leaf litter and other plant material is completely decomposed all of the chemicals
such as carbon are returned to the soil to be used again when more plants grow in their
place.
Conclusion:
Through the study and experiment I have discovered more about the ecosystem that I live in
than I knew before, I learnt all the finer details of how exactly the plants obtain their energy
via photosynthesis and then distribute it to other forms of life in the ecosystem, using the
experiments I conducted for this study I achieved a greater understanding on how the biotic
and abiotic components of the ecosystem work together and interact, the purpose of the
study was to obtain a greater understanding of a particular ecosystem within our planet and
I feel this study has achieved its purpose well.
References:
Photos:
Figure 2, Hughes 2014
Map:
Figure 1, Google Maps 2014,
https://maps.google.com.au/maps?q=sassafras&safe=off&ie=UTF-8&ei=jtV2U6PlOs-
ZlQW3kYDgBw&sqi=2&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ