Environmental Factors
Contents
Key Stage 4
Meaning
The conditions of an environment that can change the features of an organism or the features of a community within an ecosystem.
About Environmental Factors and Organisms
- Drought can cause plants to wilt.
- Poor nutrition can lead to an organism not growing as large as it would with good nutrition. The height of humans is affected by environmental factors.
- Sunlight can cause a humans skin to become darker.
About Environmental Factors and Communities
- Drought is an abiotic factor which can cause plants to grow more slowly. This leads to the primary consumers dying from starvation when there is not enough food. This will briefly create more food for the secondary consumers but will then reduce when the population of primary consumers has decreased.
- Flooding is an abiotic factor which can drown animals which may reduce the number of primary consumers allowing more producers to grow, without being eaten, after the flooding.
- Disease is a biotic factor which can lower the population of a specific organism within a community. This will have an effect on other organisms in the community due to the feeding relationships between them. If a disease reduces a population then the population of the organism that eats it will decrease while the population of organisms that are eaten by it will increase.