BIOLOGY 3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Greenland Ice Sheet, Evapotranspiration, East Los Angeles College
Document Summary
Ecology - from the greek, oikos (home) and logos (to study) Various levels: global, landscape, ecosystem, community, population, organismal. Factors that contribute to species distribution patterns: latitude, elevation, annual precipitation. Biomes: areas of the earth characterized by similar plant communities and physical environments, defined as a simple, large-scale type of ecosystem that is representative of a climate type and region. Examples: tropical rainforest, desert, cloud forest temperature and precipitation influences vegetation. Holdridge life zones the system is a global bioclimatic scheme for the classification of land areas by leslie holdridge (1947, 1967). There are 36 classifications ranging from polar desert to tropical rain forest. Mean annual biotemperature: based on the growing season length and temperature. Ratio of annual potential evapotranspiration to mean total annual precipitation. influenced by altitude and latitude. Species cannot survive outside of its physiological tolerance range. Organisms must be able to survive throughout the full range of environmental extremes.
