Unit 7 Reflection

This unit was about ecology, which is the study of interactions between organisms and their environment. One topic that we learned about in the beginning of our unit was abiotic and biotic factors which are nonliving and living things, and the levels of organization which is organism, population, community, ecosystem, and biome/biosphere. Later we learned about food chains which show how organisms get their energy, and food webs which show how most organisms eat more than one thing and they are more accurate. Towards the end of the unit we learned about the factors that affects populations such as immigration and emigration, and that carrying capacity is the maximum population size that an environment can support. Next we learned about the nutrient cycles which include the water, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous cycles which provide organisms things that are essential to life. Finally we learned about biodiversity, the total number of species in an ecosystems, which includes genetic, species, and ecosystem diversity. In our previous unit about bioethics, I made a blog post about Cloning Mammoths which has some things that are similar to this unit, like how because of the things that we want we are endangering other species. 

One thing that I would want to learn more about would be about how people figure out the carrying capacity for certain species. I think that when we had to do the Conservation Biology Project in class, my collaboration skills improved than when we had to do group work last semester. Some things that went well with my group was that we agreed on most things that we wanted on the presentation and we made sure that we finished everything on time so that we didn't have to do it for homework. One thing that didn't go well was editing the video, so we had to redo it because it had to just be one video instead of multiple ones. I learned more about what we had learned during this unit by researching about the area that we chose by adding things that we learned to it. I think that the collaboration was good in our group, because we managed our time well each period that we got to work in and we were able to agree and help out with others in our group.