Matter Cycles

     The Hydrologic cycle focuses on the movement of water through the biosphere. Its major steps are evaporation, condensation, precipitation, transpiration, and runoff. The cycle represents how water is evaporated into the sky by heat and then condenses into the clouds. Which is why we then have rain, hail, or snow. The Carbon cycle shows how carbon cycles in the atmosphere. Two ways that this can happen is by combustion which is manually burning something and by respiration which is what we all do, breathing. Nitrogen cycle is the most challenging because nitrogen can be absorbed by plants or be stored into the atmosphere. Also how it can be converted for plant use. In my opinion, the most important cycle is the water cycle. I think so because the hydrologic cycle is a closed cycle and it shows the importance of saving water and how if we use it all up without care, it would be very hard to save or get it back.

Trophic Gamble

     In class today we were finishing our activity on Trophic Gamble. What this activity was base on was the concept of Net Primary Productivity and Gross Primary Productivity. The goal of this project was to quantify the number of humans that can be sustained on a specific amount of land being either primary consumers or secondary consumers. The basics of this activity was to understand the food chain and the efficiency of energy transfer between trophic levels.  We had to use GPP (Gross Primary Productivity) and NPP (Net Primary Productivity). What GPP is the total amount of solar energy that producers in an ecosystem capture via photosynthesis over a given amount of time. NPP is the energy captured by producers in an ecosystem minus the energy producers respire. So we applied these concepts to what we were doing. We had to measure the "school garden" and then pick a crop. So we had to multiply the wheats' kcal with 6 meters because we rounded and ended with 19,200kcal which equals our GPP. We then had to find our NPP which was basically multiplying 75% because wheat uses 75% of calories 480,000. We got 120,000.
     The control we had was the crops. The area in which we could garden changed because we then were given acreage of 24 plots. Being a vegetarian would be a positive thing because in the activity we had to calculate the caloric requirement of one of our animals and if people were just vegetarians it would help the animals who are being killed and used.