Carlingford Lough Case Study

Although it supports a number of different organisms, Nudgee Beach lacks many of the fundamentals that make up a healthy and successful ecosystem. The first indicator of this is from the lack of birds present in the area. Although it has been noted for terrestrial bird species – such as kingfishers, pelicans, ibis, egrets, jabiru, stilts and heron – and wading bird species – such as golden plovers, curlews, tattlers and godwits – to have been spotted at Nudgee Beach and surrounding areas in the past; after a day’s worth of extensive observation and research, it was found that the birds observed were limited to magpie, ibis, great knot and eastern curlew species. To intensify this factor, at the time by which this lack of species was recorded, Nudgee Beach was expected to have started seeing tens of thousands of birds arrive for the migratory season [21]. This blatant lack of bird species diversity and quantity may have been due to the lack of small organisms within the ecosystem. The restricted number of small organisms at Nudgee Beach is detrimental to the entire ecosystem as these organisms make up the bottom levels of the food web and provide higher-level organisms with adequate amounts of food to consume. The smaller organisms expected to be observed – including; crustacean, shell, mollusc, lizard, frog, fish, worm, arachnid and insect species – was limited to the infrequent observation of crustacean, shell,

Data for Trews Weir clearly implies that dace in this area do not have usual food available in this area compared to others along the river so it is essential to look for other food items to populate this region. This explains why they do not have a growth rate that is in line with the other sampling site (figure 9).

Habitat: Commonly found in terrestrial. Forest light gaps, slips, margins, disturbed sites, open habitats, riverbeds, cliffs, inshore and offshore islands, fernland, herbfield,

Canada Geese are herbivores whose diet changes depending on the habitat in which they are residing (“Canada Goose”, 2011). The most common food source for the Canada goose is grass, however, they also consume grains, berries (“Canada Goose”, 2011), agriculture crops such as wheat, and vegetation found near the water, such as cattails (Link, n.d.). Canada geese are somewhat particular during their food selecting process. They select protein-rich foods that will increase their energy intake, however, they will not discriminate against a less nutritious source of vegetation if it is located near the water, as waterfront environments are the Canada goose’s preferred habitat (Conover, 1991).

In a food web, energy flows and transfers through the sea birds’ ecosystem from the sun, to the plant life

It is especially important to study and understand the characteristics of these oceanographic profiles, as it is this primary production that will have large impacts on species diversity and marine food web assemblages.

The data shows that the Scrubby Woods has the highest biodiversity of all the ecosystems, rejecting the original hypothesis. This also shows that the Climax Community has the lowest biodiversity. If the test were run again, many improvements would be made. it would start by having more accurate bug counts, ensuring that the data is accurate. Also, another improvement would be to run the test as many times as possible, to better measure the biodiversity. This study has helped us more clearly know the biodiversity in the Hastings, Michigan area, but again, these numbers may not be accurate, as many improvements could have been made. It is possible many errors were made when the identifying the insects, as the students doing so were not trained

We found no significant species-area relationship for aquatic macroinvertebrates on rocks in a freshwater environment, however, there was a relationship of a number of species we had found. (r2=0.09, P=0.87; Figure 2). This means that the size of the rock influences the species richness. The principles of island biogeography do apply to the stream water because our result found that the number of species on a larger island is greater than the number of species on a small island.

The focus of my investigation is to consider ways in which the abiotic factors, biotic factors and the biology effect my chosen integrated organisms, Cellana Radians and Cellana Ornata. Which then explains their particular community pattern within the rocky shores ecosystem.

For the Chincoteague dataset, presence-absence data will be used, giving more weight to abundant species in the similarity measurements. A similar study was conducted in plant ecology by Bray and Curtis (1957), which is nicely summarized in a paper by Field et al. (1982). Before conducting the cluster analysis, however, the dataset needs to be reduced, as some species are not abundant enough to merit inclusion in this ecology study. To accomplish this, we plan on eliminating species with low abundance, by eliminating those species that fall below a specified abundance percentage. This method, too, was outlined nicely in Field et al. (1982). After reducing the data, cluster analysis can be carried

In this paper I will be doing a case study on food webs, I will explain competition, boxicity, and trophic status. I will also explain how food webs are applied to discrete mathematics and real world situation. Food web is an important ecological concept that signifies the feeding relationships within a community. It is an instrument that is use for examining the interactions within an ecological system that shows energy flows. It also shows the predator to prey relationship, for example carnivores or omnivores preying on the herbivores. The energy flow in the food web flows to herbivores which are the primary consumers, from herbivores to the carnivores’ second consumers. Discrete mathematics illustrates the food web through a graph who vertices represents the species in the community. In the graph of a food web, each species in a

Species richness is the total number of observed species in an area – in terms of this experiment, macroinvertebrate

The difference between a fundamental niche and a realized niche is that “a fundamental niche is considered the area and resources that can theoretically be utilized, whereas, a realized niche is considered the area and resources that are actually able to to be utilized by a population” (Daempfle, 2016). Thus, exemplified in the Balanus and Chthamalus genera, along the Scottish seacoasts, the two genera share the fundamental niche of the Scottish seacoast. However, the realized niche of the Balanus is it’s most suitable adaptability to the lower portion of the seacoast, whereas, the Chthamalus, is better adapted to the upper parts of the

The phenology of vertebrates was greatly altered by the mass extinctions and catastrophes that have occurred in history and still have an effect on vertebrates today. The main hypothesis for the global climate change following mass extinctions, particularly the Cretaceous-Paleogene (KPg), is black carbon spread throughout the globe and altered solar radiation to create a system of global cooling (Kaiho et al., 2016). The cooling of the Earth’s temperature created a sudden drop in precipitation and a 50-60% decrease in sunlight following the impact of the asteroid (Kaiho et al., 2016). Research shows that following the impact of the KPg extinction precipitation has substantially decreased and depends on the latitude (Kaiho 2016). The Late Ordovician mass extinction was the first of the “Big Five” and can be clearly connected with climate change (Finnegan et al., 2012). The Late Ordovician mass extinction can be explained by the climactic common cause hypothesis, which states that climate cooling has a direct influence on extinction rates by forcing tropical taxa to live in climates that did not match their niche (Finnegan et al., 2012). In a research study done on the effects of climate change in the Late Ordovician, patterns of thermal tolerance range indicators show cooling and habitat loss as an important driver

The general analysis of invertebrate richness and diversity prove that shallow leaf litter is more biodiverse than deep leaf litter. From graph 2, shallow leaf litter is proven to be more biodiverse where the spread of invertebrate richness is higher with a relatively low rate of error denoted by the low standard deviation. Similarly, figure 6 also shows a similar trend where the mean of shallow leaf litter diversity was greater than deep leaf litter. The mean results of invertebrate abundance also show shallow leaf litter to be more abundant, however this is affected by the extreme outlier seen in figure 2, where there is a large leeway for error due to the high standard deviation. This may be due to human error due to transcription, an error in counting the amount of species or the designated shallow leaf litter contained species that were extremely common, providing a large abundance value. However, figure 1 and the comparison of boxplots in graph 1, show the overall values of deep leaf litter are centred higher, indicating that deep leaf litter has greater abundance, excluding outliers.