Our Community Summarized
Our park is located within the tropical rainforest biome and is located on the Osa Peninsula in southern Costa Rica. Our park has a great amount of biodiversity that is created by the majorly undisturbed environment. This wide variety of organisms has intricate interaction both with each other and the environment and vice versa. For example, one tree within our tropical rainforest may require several species of fungus to help absorb water provided by the environment and need other organisms to help protect it from predators. We have a wide variety of factors, both living and nonliving, within our ecosystem that affect how organisms live. Biotic factors such as decomposers within the environment help circulate nutrients and other important substances through the ecosystem. Abiotic factors such as the intense sunlight cause organisms to live in a way such as to maximize exposure to it. Also, limiting factors make it so that organisms and populations within our ecosystem can only grow so much. Density-dependent factors such as disease affect populations within our tropical rainforest in a way that is increased the greater the density of organisms. Density-independent limiting factors such as poor soil with little nutrients make it so that plants can only grow so much, independently of the density of the trees around it. (50)
Also, the wide variety of organisms in our ecosystem, both producers and consumers, ensure that we have very complex interactions such as predation in our ecosystem as well as organisms that have developed very unique traits in order to better fit their niche, or role, in the environment. This directly links in to how animals such as the jaguar predate on other organisms in the ecosystem, controlling the population of organism in order to maintain a homeostatic balance while acquiring their needed energy for survival and reproduction at the same time. These complex predation relationships can be conveyed in the form of a food web which shows the various interactions in our ecosystem as well as how energy flows through the ecosystem. This food web can also be backed up with an energy pyramid which shows the various trophic levels of organisms in our ecosystem. It also shows how the energy transferred from one level to the next higher up level decreases by 10%. This can help explain why the higher level consumers in our park such as the jaguar are frequently in a precarious situation and must eat more prey to receive the needed amount of energy.
Endangered species within our ecosystem such as the poison dart are under constant threat from extinction, even with all our efforts to protect it. As shown by the food web, removing even one organism from an ecosystem may wreak terrifying damage on an ecosystem as the interactions between organisms will change drastically to fill in the vacuum that is left.
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Succession is another important part of a healthy ecosystem, but it creates change instead of stability. It typically clears away existing life or begins in an area without any sustained life. Then, the area gradually develops until it hosts a wide variety of complex organisms. This allows existing organisms from other areas to spread and take up home in a new area, spreading the diversity and interactions of many species.
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Our Conclusions
The overall conclusions that can be made from looking at our park is that it is more than just an area where a large amount of animals go about their lives. It also draws a vast amount of its diversity from the unique plants that can be found here. These plants and animals interact to truly form what can be considered a community. They rely on each other to live in this environment and give each other various advantages in a reciprocated fashion. What most people don't think about when thinking of our ecosystem though is the ecosystem itself. The nonliving, abiotic factors that are abundant in our ecosystem also affect the way every single organism lives. Our ecosystem is a large, interconnected tropic of great diversity, where every single thing that occurs affects more than just one small thing. A chain of reactions occurs at every single instance and reverberates throughout our entire park.
After reading this website dedicated to one of the most organically rich parks in the world, we hope you, the reader, have seen just how amazing yet fragile such a wonder of nature can be. We hope you realize just how many organisms depend on an undisturbed environment in order to continue living in peace, and how great a threat that we as people pose to this ecosystem and the others like it. We hope that you take from this that our ecosystem and others are all more than just a place where some special animals live. It is a bastion of biodiversity that interacts in amazing ways that we as people are still working to fully understand. It is a pillar of science, as we still do not completely know the vast extent of what rainforest plants can offer to us. But most importantly, it is an island of nature floating in the midst of human expansion, and it is parks like ours that let nature remain undisturbed in a way so that people can still appreciate the beauty of nature in the future.
After reading this website dedicated to one of the most organically rich parks in the world, we hope you, the reader, have seen just how amazing yet fragile such a wonder of nature can be. We hope you realize just how many organisms depend on an undisturbed environment in order to continue living in peace, and how great a threat that we as people pose to this ecosystem and the others like it. We hope that you take from this that our ecosystem and others are all more than just a place where some special animals live. It is a bastion of biodiversity that interacts in amazing ways that we as people are still working to fully understand. It is a pillar of science, as we still do not completely know the vast extent of what rainforest plants can offer to us. But most importantly, it is an island of nature floating in the midst of human expansion, and it is parks like ours that let nature remain undisturbed in a way so that people can still appreciate the beauty of nature in the future.