Biomass essays

Biomass essays Many factors contribute to the diversity of life in an environment. The availability of nutrients and sunlight, along with other factors that play a pivotal role in determining what and how much life an area can sustain. While studying the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it came to my attention that the classical pyramid shape of the producer, C1, C2, C3, biomass pyramid did little to take into account the amount of detrital input. I hypothesized that the amount detrital input greatly effected the number of C1, C2, and C3 consumers and thus the overall biodiversity of an ecosystem. Further, if you could find a test-bed where detrital input was the only real difference between two similar ecosystems you would find that organisms of each ecosystem would be adapted to the peculiar conditions. This adaptation would lead you to find vast differences in the taxonomic groups associated with each With this in mind, I first set out to find two similar ecosystems were I could test this hypothesis. Second, to sample, categorize and compare the diversity of these ecosystems along taxonomic lines. Next, I planned to use several of the widely accepted diversity indexes (Simpsons Index, Shannons Index the Chi-Square Test) to compare statistically, the diversity of my Scientific Law states that in order to test the effects of one factor in an equation you must eliminate all other factors . In order to test the detrital base as the limiting factor, all other limiting agents must be eliminated. In a field experiment this is technically impossible; though it is possible to come close by choosing two ecosystems that are very similar. In order to keep this experiment as simple as possible the ecosystem chosen had to be nearly self contained and small. The smaller and more contained the ecosystem the less chance for outside input that could destroy our results. Alazan and B...