Stage 1: Identifying Desired Results

Enduring understandings:

• The stabilty of an ecosystem is largely dependent upon the diversity of life forms it contains.
  
• The likelihood of a single species' survival and adaptation is increased by the genetic diversity that exists in its population.
• The human impact on earth's systems has created a significant loss of biodiversity, and threatens to destabilize the very ecosystems humans depend on for sustenance.
• The relationships amongst living and non-living elements on earth's surface form a delicate web of interdependencies that must be modeled and understood if humans wish to protect them for the future.
• Authors influence society through literature.
  

Unit EQ: How can scientific models of ecosystems enable us to make well-informed environmental policy decisions?

Supporting EQs:

In what ways is the expression "strength in diversity" true of a single species? An entire living system?

In what ways do humans both depend upon and alter the earth's ecosystems?

How do energy and nutrients move through the biosphere?

In what ways do the writings of Dr. Seuss, Emerson, and Carson argue for humans to change their relationship with their living environment?

Can human life on earth be sustained?

Important to know:

• An ecosystem consists of a web of relationships amongst the living and non-living parts of a defined area. These interdependencies can be modeled using food chains, food webs, energy flow, and nutrient flow diagrams.
• The survival of a species depends upon its continued, successful reproduction.
• The size of a given population is determined by the rate of reproduction and the carrying capacity of the environment.
• Living species interact in a variety of feeding dependencies, which include predator-prey, producer-consumer, host-symbiant, host-parasite, and detritivore.
• Literature has played a role in increasing public awareness about environmental issues.

Important to be able to do:

• Create and interpret food chains, food webs and energy pyramids, nutrient flow diagrams to model simple ecosystems.
• Graph and interpret the dynamic equilibrium of population over time. Infer and predict population changes resulting from environmental disturbances using a food web.
• Create a literary response that deals with the subject of the environment.

Worth being familiar with:

• Thoreau's Walden, Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring are three examples of literature that deal with the subject of the environment and that increased the public's awareness to the damage humans are doing to the ecosystem.