BRCM COLLEGE OF BUSSINESS

ADMINISTRATION, SURAT
ASSIGNMENT: 1

(2019-2020)

FYBBA SEM: 1

GROUP: 1
NAME ROLL NO

ANAJWALA DHARMAJ 03
DAVE RAM 23
DESAI MIT 25
GAJJAR JAMES 33
GANDHI RYTHEM 39
JIKADRA KAUSHIK 68

TOPIC:

ECO-SYSTEM

WATER CYCLE & THE FOOD CHAIN

SUBMITTED TO:

HUMA MAM SHOHABUDDIN

SUNBMITTED ON:

26 SEPTEMBER 2019

SIGNATURE
 ECO-SYSTEM

Introduction
❖ What do a tide pool on the California coast and the Amazon rainforest of
South America have in common? Despite being many orders of magnitude
different in size, both are examples of ecosystems—communities of
organisms living together in combination with their physical environment.
❖ As a reminder, a community consists of all the populations of all the species
that live together in a particular area. The concepts of ecosystem and
community are closely related—the difference is that an ecosystem
includes the physical environment, while a community does not. In other
words, a community is the biotic, or living, component of an ecosystem. In
addition to this biotic component, the ecosystem also includes an abiotic
component—the physical environment.
❖ Ecosystems can be small, such as the tide pools found near the rocky
shores of many oceans, or very large, such as the Amazon Rainforest in
South America. It's basically up to the ecologist studying the ecosystem to
define its boundaries in a way that makes sense for their questions of
interest.

What are ecosystems like?

❖ The short answer: incredibly diverse! Not only can ecosystems vary in size,
but they can also differ in just about every imaginable biotic or abiotic
feature.
❖ Some ecosystems are marine, others freshwater, and others yet
terrestrial—land based. Ocean ecosystems are most common on Earth, as
oceans and the living organisms they contain cover 75% of the Earth's
surface. Freshwater ecosystems are the rarest, covering only 1.8% of the
Earth's surface. Terrestrial, land, ecosystems cover the remainder of Earth.
❖ Terrestrial ecosystems can be further grouped into broad categories called
biomes, based largely on climate. Examples of terrestrial biomes include
tropical rain forests, savannas, deserts, coniferous forests, deciduous
forests, and tundra. The map below shows the broad distribution of
biomes on Earth.

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❖ Even within a biome, there can be great diversity. For example, both the
Sonoran Desert, on the left, and the interior of the island of Boa Vista, on
the right, can be classified as deserts, but they have very different
ecological communities. Many more species of plants and animals live in
the Sonoran Desert.

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Energy and matter in ecosystems

❖ Ecosystem ecologists are often most interested in tracing the movement
of energy and matter through ecosystems.
❖ We’ll take a closer look at the movement of energy and matter when we
consider food webs, networks of organisms that feed on one another,
and biogeochemical cycles, the pathways taken by chemical elements as
they move through the biosphere. The organisms found in an ecosystem
tend to have adaptations, beneficial features arising by natural selection,
that help them get energy and matter in the context of that particular
ecosystem.
❖ Before we get into details, though, let’s look at the key features of how
energy and matter travel through ecosystems. Both energy and matter
are conserved, neither created nor destroyed, but take different routes
through ecosystems:

❖ Matter is recycled; the same atoms are reused over and over.
❖ Energy flows through the ecosystem, usually entering as light and exiting
as heat.
Matter is recycled.

❖ Matter is recycled through Earth’s ecosystems—though it may move from

one ecosystem to another as it does when nutrients are washed away into
a river 11start superscript, 1, end superscript. The same atoms are used
over and over again, assembled into different chemical forms and
incorporated into the bodies of different organisms.
❖ As an example, let’s see how chemical nutrients move through a terrestrial
ecosystem. A land plant takes in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and
other nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorous, from the soil to build
the molecules that make up its cells. When an animal eats the plant, it uses
the plant’s molecules for energy and as building material for its own cells,
often rearranging atoms and molecules into new forms.
❖ When plants and animals carry out cellular respiration—break down
molecules as fuel—carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere.

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Similarly, when they excrete waste or die, their chemical compounds are
used for energy and building material by bacteria and fungi. These
decomposers release simple molecules back into the soil and atmosphere,
where they can be taken up anew in the next round of the cycle.

❖ Thanks to this recycling, the atoms that make up your body right now have
long, unique histories. They’ve most likely been part of plants, animals,
other people, and even dinosaurs!

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Energy flow is unidirectional, or one-way.

❖ Energy, unlike matter, cannot be recycled in ecosystems. Instead, energy
flow through an ecosystem is a one-way street—generally, from light to
heat.
❖ Energy usually enters ecosystems as sunlight and is captured in chemical
form by photosynthesizes like plants and algae. The energy is then passed
through the ecosystem, changing forms as organisms metabolize, produce
waste, eat one another, and eventually, die and decompose.
❖ Each time energy changes forms, some of it is converted to heat. Heat still
counts as energy—and thus no energy has been destroyed—but it
generally can't be used as an energy source by living organisms. Ultimately,
energy that entered the ecosystem as sunlight is dissipated as heat and
radiated back into space.
❖ This one-way flow of energy through ecosystems means that every
ecosystem needs a constant supply of energy, usually from the sun, in
order to function. Energy can be passed between organisms, but it cannot
be recycled because some of it is lost as heat in each transfer.

Stability and dynamics of ecosystems

❖ Ecosystems are dynamic systems, and a static ecosystem would be a dead
ecosystem—just as a static cell would be a dead cell. As we discussed
above, energy is constantly flowing through an ecosystem and chemical
nutrients are continually being recycled. At higher levels of organization,
organisms are dying and being born, populations are fluctuating in their
numbers, and climate patterns are varying seasonally and in less
predictable ways.

Equilibrium and disturbance

❖ Equilibrium is the steady state of an ecosystem, in which its composition

and identity remain generally constant despite fluctuations in physical
conditions and the makeup of the biotic community. Ecosystems may be

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knocked out of equilibrium by disturbances, disruptive events that affect

their composition.
❖ Some disturbances are a result of natural processes. For example, fire is a
disturbance that can be caused by lightning in a prairie or forest
ecosystem. Other disturbances are the result of human activities.
Examples include acid rainfall, deforestation, algal blooms, and the
introduction of invasive species.
❖ Different ecosystems may respond differently to the same disturbance;
one may recover rapidly, and another may recover more slowly—or not at
all.

Resistance and resilience

❖ Ecologists sometimes use two parameters to describe how an ecosystem

responds to disturbance. These parameters are resistance and resilience.
The ability of an ecosystem to remain at equilibrium in spite of
disturbances is called resistance. How readily an ecosystem returns to
equilibrium after being disturbed is called resilience. Some ecologists
consider resistance to be an element of resilience—one that acts on a
short timescale.
❖ Many ecologists think that the biodiversity of an ecosystem plays a key role
in stability. For example, if there were just one plant species with a
particular role in an ecosystem, a disturbance that harms that one
species—say, a drought for a drought-sensitive species—might have a
severe impact on the ecosystem as a whole. In contrast, if there were
several plant species with similar functional roles, there would be a better
chance of one of them being drought-tolerant and helping the ecosystem
as a whole survive the drought period.
❖ Ecosystem resistance and resilience are important when we consider the
effects of disturbances caused by human activity. If a disturbance is severe
enough, it may change an ecosystem beyond the point of recovery—push
the ecosystem into a zone where it is no longer resilient. A disturbance of
this sort could lead to permanent alteration or loss of the ecosystem.

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Components of Ecosystem
❖ There are two main components of an ecosystem which are in constant
communication with each other. They are the biotic components and the
abiotic components.

Biotic Components of Ecosystem

❖ The living components of an ecosystem are called the biotic components.
Some of these factors include plants, animals, as well as fungi and bacteria.
These biotic components can be further classified, based on the energy
requirement source. Producers, consumers, and decomposers are the
three broad categories of biotic components.
➢ Producers are the plants in the ecosystem, which can generate their own
energy requirement through photosynthesis, in the presence of sunlight
and chlorophyll. All other living beings are dependent on plants for their
energy requirement of food as well as oxygen.
➢ Consumers include herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores. The herbivores
are the living organisms that feed on plants. Carnivores eat other living
organisms. Omnivores are animals that can eat both plant and animal
tissue.
➢ Decomposers are the fungi and bacteria, which are the saprophytes. They
feed on the decaying organic matter and convert this matter into nitrogen
and carbon dioxide. The saprophytes play a vital role in recycling the
nutrients so that the producers i.e. plants can use them once again.

Abiotic Components of Ecosystem

➢ Abiotic components are the physical and/or the chemical factors that act
on the living organisms at any part of their life. These are also called as the
ecological factors. The physical and chemical factors are characteristic of
the environment. Light, air, soil, and nutrients, etc. form the abiotic
components of an ecosystem.

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➢ The abiotic factors vary from ecosystem to ecosystem. In an aquatic

ecosystem, the abiotic factors may include water pH, sunlight, turbidity,
water depth, salinity, available nutrients and dissolved oxygen. Similarly,
abiotic factors in terrestrial ecosystems can include soil, soil types,
temperature, rain, altitude, wind, nutrients, sunlight etc.
➢ Here, the sun is the energy source. Producers/plants use this energy to
synthesize food in the presence of carbon dioxide and chlorophyll. The
energy from the sun, through several chemical reactions, turns into
chemical energy.

Water cycle
❖ Water is one of the key ingredients to life on Earth. About 75 percent of
our planet is covered by water or ice. The water cycle is the endless process
that connects all of that water. It joins the Earth’s oceans, land, and
atmosphere.
❖ The Earth’s water cycle began about 3.8 billion years ago when rain fell on
a cooling Earth, forming the oceans. The rain came from water vapor that
escaped the magma in the Earth’s molten core into the atmosphere.
Energy from the sun helped power the water cycle and Earth’s gravity kept
water in the atmosphere from leaving the planet.
❖ The oceans hold about 97 percent of the water on Earth. About 1.7 percent
of Earth’s water is stored in polar ice caps and glaciers. Rivers, lakes, and
soil hold approximately 1.7 percent. A tiny fraction—just 0.001 percent—
exists in the Earth’s atmosphere as water vapor.
❖ When molecules of water vapor return to liquid or solid form, they create
cloud droplets that can fall back to Earth as rain or snow—a process called
condensation. Most precipitation lands in the oceans. Precipitation that
falls onto land flows into rivers, streams, and lakes. Some of it seeps into
the soil where it is held underground as groundwater.
❖ When warmed by the sun, water on the surface of oceans and freshwater
bodies evaporates, forming a vapor. Water vapor rises into the
atmosphere, where it condenses, forming clouds. It then falls back to the
ground as precipitation. Moisture can also enter the atmosphere directly
from ice or snow. In a process called sublimation, solid water, such as ice

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or snow, can transform directly into water vapor without first becoming a
liquid.

Global water distribution

❖ For an estimated explanation of where Earth's water exists, look at the
chart below. By now, you know that the water cycle describes the
movement of Earth's water, so realize that the chart and table below
represent the presence of Earth's water at a single point in time. If you
check back in a thousand or million years, no doubt these numbers will be
different!
❖ Notice how of the world's total water supply of about 332.5 million cubic
miles of water, over 96 percent is saline. And, of the total freshwater, over
68 percent is locked up in ice and glaciers. Another 30 percent of
freshwater is in the ground. Fresh surface-water sources, such as rivers and
lakes, only constitute about 22,300 cubic miles (93,100 cubic kilometres),
which is about 1/150th of one percent of total water. Yet, rivers and lakes
are the sources of most of the water people use every day.

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❖ Notice how of the world's total water supply of about 333 million cubic
miles (1,386 million cubic kilometres) of water, over 96 percent is saline.
And, of the total freshwater, over 68 percent is locked up in ice and
glaciers. Another 30 percent of freshwater is in the ground. Thus, rivers
and lakes that supply surface water for human uses only constitute about
22,300 cubic miles (93,100 cubic kilometres), which is about 0.007 percent
of total water, yet rivers are the source of most of the water people use.

water source Water volume, Water volume, Percent of Percent of

in cubic Total
in cubic miles freshwater
kilometres water
Oceans, Seas, & Bays 32,10,00,000 1,33,80,00,000 -- 96.54
Ice caps, Glaciers, & Permanent
57,73,000 2,40,64,000 68.7 1.74
Snow
Groundwater 56,14,000 2,34,00,000 -- 1.69
Fresh 25,26,000 1,05,30,000 30.1 0.76
Saline 30,88,000 1,28,70,000 -- 0.93
Soil Moisture 3,959 16,500 0.05 0.001
Ground Ice & Permafrost 71,970 3,00,000 0.86 0.022
Lakes 42,320 1,76,400 -- 0.013
Fresh 21,830 91,000 0.26 0.007
Saline 20,490 85,400 -- 0.006
Atmosphere 3,095 12,900 0.04 0.001
Swamp Water 2,752 11,470 0.03 0.0008
Rivers 509 2,120 0.006 0.0002
Biological Water 269 1,120 0.003 0.0001

Process of water cycle

❖ Where does all the Earth's water come from? Primordial Earth was an
incandescent globe made of magma, but all magmas contain water. Water
set free by magma began to cool down the Earth's atmosphere, until it
could stay on the surface as a liquid. Volcanic activity kept and still keeps
introducing water in the atmosphere, thus increasing the surface- and
groundwater volume of the Earth.
❖ The water cycle has no starting point. But we'll begin in the oceans, since
that is where most of Earth's water exists. The sun, which drives the water
cycle, heats water in the oceans. Some of it evaporates as vapor into the
air. Ice and snow can sublimate directly into water vapor. Rising air

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currents take the vapor up into the atmosphere, along with water from
evapotranspiration, which is water transpired from plants and evaporated
from the soil. The vapor rises into the air where cooler temperatures cause
it to condense into clouds.
❖ Air currents move clouds around the globe, cloud particles collide, grow,
and fall out of the sky as precipitation. Some precipitation falls as snow and
can accumulate as ice caps and glaciers, which can store frozen water for
thousands of years. Snowpack in warmer climates often thaw and melt
when spring arrives, and the melted water flows overland as snowmelt.
❖ Most precipitation falls back into the oceans or onto land, where, due to
gravity, the precipitation flows over the ground as surface runoff. A portion
of runoff enters rivers in valleys in the landscape, with streamflow moving
water towards the oceans. Runoff, and groundwater seepage, accumulate
and are stored as freshwater in lakes. Not all runoff flows into rivers,
though. Much of it soaks into the ground as infiltration. Some water
infiltrates deep into the ground and replenishes aquifers (saturated
subsurface rock), which store huge amounts of freshwater for long periods
of time.
❖ Some infiltration stays close to the land surface and can seep back into
surface-water bodies (and the ocean) as groundwater discharge, and some
groundwater finds openings in the land surface and emerges as freshwater
springs. Over time, though, all of this water keeps moving, some to renter
the ocean, where the water cycle "ends" ... oops - I mean, where it
"begins."

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6 Main Components of Water Cycle

1. Evaporation:
❖ Evaporation is the process where a liquid change from its liquid state to a
gaseous state. Liquid water becomes water vapour. Temperature is the
primary factor for evaporation.
❖ During the water cycle the water of the oceans and freshwater bodies,
such as lakes and rivers, is warmed by the sun and evaporates. During the
process of evaporation, impurities in the water are left behind. As a result,
the water that goes into the atmosphere is cleaner than it was on Earth.

2. Condensation:
❖ Condensation is the opposite of evaporation. Condensation is the process
where a gas is changed into a liquid. Condensation occurs when the
temperature of the vapour decreases.
❖ The water droplets formed from condensation are very small and they
remain suspended in the atmosphere. There millions of droplets of
suspended water form clouds in the sky or fog at ground level. Water
condenses into droplets only when there are small dusts particles present
around.

3. Precipitation:
❖ When the temperature and atmospheric pressure are right, the small
droplets of water in clouds form larger droplets or raindrops and it is called
precipitation. The raindrops fall to earth.
❖ As a result of evaporation, condensation and precipitation, water travels
from the surface of the Earth goes into the atmosphere, and returns to
Earth again.

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4. Surface Runoff:
❖ Much of the water that returns to Earth as precipitation runs off the
surface of the land and flows down-hill into streams, rivers, ponds and
lakes. Small streams flow into the ocean. Surface runoff is an important
part of the water cycle because, through surface runoff, much of the water
returns again to the oceans, where a great deal of evaporation occurs.

5. Infiltration:
❖ Infiltration is an important process where rain water soaks into the ground,
through the soil and underlying rock layers. Some of this water ultimately
returns to the surface at springs or in low spots downhill. Some of the
water remains underground and is called groundwater.
❖ As the water infiltrates through the soil and rock layers, many of the
impurities in the water are filtered out. This filtering process helps in
cleaning of the water.

6.Transpiration or Evapotranspiration:
❖ This is performed by plants. As plants absorb water from the soil, the water
moves from the roots through the stems to the leaves. Once the water
reaches the leaves, some of it evaporates from the leaves, adding to the
amount of water vapour in the air. This process of evaporation through
plant leaves is called transpiration. In large forests, an enormous amount
of water will transpire through leaves.

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Food chain
❖ Food chain, in ecology, the sequence of transfers of matter and energy in
the form of food from organism to organism. Food chains intertwine locally
into a food web because most organisms consume more than one type of
animal or plant. Plants, which convert solar energy to food by
photosynthesis, are the primary food source. In a predator chain, a plant-
eating animal is eaten by a flesh-eating animal. In a parasite chain, a
smaller organism consumes part of a larger host and may itself be
parasitized by even smaller organisms. In a saprophytic chain,
microorganisms live on dead organic matter.
❖ Because energy, in the form of heat, is lost at each step, or trophic level,
chains do not normally encompass more than four or five trophic levels.
People can increase the total food supply by cutting out one step in the
food chain: instead of consuming animals that eat cereal grains, the people
themselves consume the grains. Because the food chain is made shorter,
the total amount of energy available to the final consumers is increased.

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Life of food chain

❖ Have you ever wondered why we can't seem to feed the world's hungry?
It's a complex issue, but it might surprise you to learn that it's not because
there isn't enough food; current agricultural capacity, based on current
technology, exists to feed as many as 10 billion people. The Earth's
population is "only" about 7 billion. The big question really is: If we want to
feed everyone, what would everyone need to eat? To answer that
question, download this excel spreadsheet and try plugging in some
numbers.
❖ Example: One acre of a grain crop could be used to feed cattle, and then
the cattle could be used to feed people. If 50% of the energy is lost to the
cattle, you could feed twice as many people if you fed them the grain
directly. Another way of looking at it is that it would only take a half acre
of land to feed the people grain, but a whole acre if you feed the grain to
the cattle and the cattle to the people. A common practice to grow cattle
faster is to feed them ground up animal protein. This means that when we
eat the meat from the cow, we're at the tertiary level or higher. The loss
of energy between trophic levels may also be even higher. Recent studies
suggest that only 10% of energy is converted to biomass from one trophic
level to the next!
❖ The Food Chain: The answer has to do with trophic levels. As you probably
know, the organisms at the base of the food chain are photosynthetic;
plants on land and phytoplankton (algae) in the oceans. These organisms
are called the producers, and they get their energy directly from sunlight
and inorganic nutrients. The organisms that eat the producers are the
primary consumers. They tend to be small in size and there are many of
them. The primary consumers are herbivores (vegetarians). The organisms
that eat the primary consumers are meat eaters (carnivores) and are called
the secondary consumers. The secondary consumers tend to be larger and
fewer in number. This continues on, all the way up to the top of the food
chain. About 50% of the energy (possibly as much as 90%) in food is lost at
each trophic level when an organism is eaten, so it is less efficient to be a
higher order consumer than a primary consumer. Therefore, the energy
transfer from one trophic level to the next, up the food chain, is like a

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pyramid; wider at the base and narrower at the top. Because of this
inefficiency, there is only enough food for a few top-level consumers, but
there is lots of food for herbivores lower down on the food chain. There
are fewer consumers than producers.

Desert Grassland Pond

Trophic Level Biome Biome Biome Ocean Biome

Producer (Photosynthetic) Cactus Grass Algae Phytoplankton

Insect
Primary Consumer (Herbivore) Butterfly Grasshopper Larva Zooplankton
Secondary Consumer (Carnivore) Lizard Mouse Minnow Fish
Tertiary Consumer (Carnivore) Snake Snake Frog Seal
Quaternary Consumer (Carnivore) Roadrunner Hawk Raccoon Shark

❖ Food Web: At each trophic level, there may be many more species than
indicated in the table above. Food webs can be very complex. Food
availability may vary seasonally or by time of day. An organism like a
mouse might play two roles, eating insects on occasion (making it a
secondary consumer), but also dining directly on plants (making it a
primary consumer). A food web of who eats who in the southwest
American desert biome might look something like this:
❖ Keystone Species: In some food webs, there is one critical "keystone
species" upon which the entire system depends. In the same way that
an arch collapse when the keystone is removed, an entire food chain
can collapse if there is a decline in a keystone species. Often, the
keystone species is a predator that keeps the herbivores in check, and
prevents them from overconsuming the plants, leading to a massive die
off. When we remove top predators like grizzly bears, orca whales, or
wolves, for example, there is evidence that it affects not just the prey
species, but even the physical environment.
❖ Apex Predators: These species are at the top of the food chain and the
healthy adults have no natural predators. The young and old may in
some cases be preyed upon, but they typically succumb to disease,
hunger, the effects of aging, or some combination of them. The also
suffer from competition with humans, who often eliminate the top

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predators in order to have exclusive access to the prey species, or

through habitat destruction, which is an indirect form of competition.
❖ Decomposers: When organisms die, they are sometimes eaten by
scavengers but the remaining tissues are broken down by fungi and
bacteria. In this way, the nutrients that were part of the body are
returned to the bottom of the trophic pyramid.
❖ Bioaccumulation: In addition to being less energy efficient, eating
higher up the food chain has its risks. Pesticides and heavy metals like
mercury, arsenic, and lead tend to be consumed in small quantities by
the primary consumers. These toxins get stored in the fats of the
animal. When this animal is eaten by a secondary consumer, these
toxins become more concentrated because secondary consumers eat
lots of primary consumers, and often live longer too. Swordfish and
tuna are near the top of the aquatic food chain and, when we eat them,
we are consuming all of the toxins that they have accumulated over a
lifetime. For this reason, pregnant women are advised against eating
these foods.

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Summary
❖ Ecosystem represent the living community of plants and animals in any
area along with the non-living components of the environment such as soil,
air and water.
❖ The structural aspects of ecosystems include producers (plants which
manufacture food), consumers (plants, animals and invertebrates that live
on producers) and decomposers (worms, insects, bacteria and fungi which
break down organic material into smaller particles).
❖ Carnivores feed on herbivores which in turn feed on plants.at every stage
of this food chain, energy is transferred and lost from one living organism
to another.
❖ Ecosystems provide a range of goods and services essential to human life.
Therefore, it is crucial that we protect and conserve our natural ecosystem
and resources.

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