California Standards Biology
Unit 7: Ecology
Standards
Stability in an ecosystem is a balance between competing effects. As a basis for understanding this concept:
- 6a. Students know biodiversity is the sum total of different kinds of organisms and is affected by alterations of habitats.
- 6b. 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.
- 6c. Students know how fluctuations in population size in an ecosystem are determined by the relative rates of birth, immigration, emigration, and death.
- 6d. 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.
- 6e. Students know a vital part of an ecosystem is the stability of its producers and decomposers.
- 6f. 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.
- 6g. ***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.
