September 2015 Review Draft hs 4 Course Life Science/ Biology High School Four Course Model – Life Science/ Biology
Unit 6: Ecosystem dynamics, functioning, and resilience
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- Background and Instructional Suggestions
- Unit 7: Social interactions and group behavior
Unit 6: Ecosystem dynamics, functioning, and resilience
Background and Instructional SuggestionsIn this unit, students will study the effects of changes to an ecosystem, whether natural or human induced, and relate these changes to the effects they have on population interactions within these ecosystems. In the previous units, students expanded on their knowledge of natural factors like food, habitat resources, and weather that can affect the size of a population. In middle school, students learned that any change, either physical or biological, to an ecosystem can lead to a change in populations living in that ecosystem (MS-LS2-4). Many of the human-induced changes in ecosystems have unintended consequences, meaning humans did something to an ecosystem for one reason without thinking through the long term results on other aspects of the ecosystem. For example, humans clear-cut the tropical rainforests in order to provide more land for farming. The result was a disruption of the cycling of matter in the forest, which then produced infertile soil and flooding, and thus the unintended consequence that farming is no longer possible because the forest is gone. Other negative changes to an ecosystem can be natural and might or might not effect living populations within the ecosystem. If the negative change results in competition for resources, food or shelter, then the impact on population size will be density dependent. For example, if the population is large and there is very little food, then some of that population will not survive. The more-fit members of the population will out-compete each other for resources, and this competition can damage ecosystems if the more-fit members deplete or eliminate the resource. The depletion of a resource can make it difficult for the ecosystem to recover to its original state, and the ecosystem may now take on a new version. As a culminating project for this unit, students could design solutions that slow down and possibly reverse the damage humans have done, which has resulted in the destruction of ecosystems. Using multiple resources and multiple ways of presenting explanations can be integrated into students’ English Language Arts courses, providing opportunities for work on writing and library research skills. Students can use government resources such as the Environmental Protection Agency website to gather evidence for their writing. This unit can emphasize the importance of conservation biology, which focuses on ways of saving endangered and threatened species (both animal and plant species). Conservation biologists support the use of wildlife corridors (these link large areas of land to other large areas so animals can migrate safely), protection of endangered species, protection of hotspots of species-rich regions, maintenance of larger environment regions instead of habitat fragmentation, observing genetic diversity in small populations, and monitoring and ameliorating effects of climate change on all ecosystems. The content in this unit reinforces California's Environmental Principles and Concepts, in particular the lessons on Biodiversity: The Keystone to Life on Earth. 6 These lessons place an emphasis on the effects of human intervention on ecosystems. Unit 7: Social interactions and group behavior
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