Climate Types, Ecosystems, and Adaptations
Climate Types and Characteristics
I Equatorial climate: constant daily oscillation. II Tropical with summer rains. III Subtropical arid, hot deserts. IV Mediterranean with summer drought. Hyperoceanic. V Temperate laurel forests. VI Typical temperate deciduous forests. VII Warm, dry, cold steppes and deserts. VIII Boreal taiga forests. IX Arctic tundra.
Ecological Concepts
Minimum Activity (Min Act): Activity is limited by an organism due to a resource available in low quantities relative to the tolerance threshold of the plant.
Law of Tolerance: The survival and reproduction of an organism are limited by the maximum and minimum values of influential conditions, beyond which no survival occurs.
- Stenothermic: Reduced thermal tolerance ranges.
- Eurythermic: Wide thermal tolerance ranges.
- Halines (salinity), hygric (humidity), chorus (location).
Ecological Niche: The N-dimensional space within which a species can maintain a viable population.
Communities: A group of organisms that inhabit and interact in the same area, and that may also have a specific zone.
Ecosystem: A biological system in which living organisms interact with the environment and its properties, including energy and material flows.
Perturbation: An abrupt modification of the environment that leads to changes in all processes within it.
Resources: All things consumed by an organism; anything that can be used by an organism at some necessary stage of their life. They can be renewable or nonrenewable.
LAI (Leaf Area Index): Adimensional. It depends on light intensity, leaf inclination, and the existence of seasonal adaptations (Beer’s Law).
Organismal Adaptations to Temperature
- Ectotherms: They do not have metabolic characteristics that allow them to change their body temperature.
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Endotherms: Use internal metabolic thermoregulation processes.
- Homeotherms: Maintain a constant body temperature despite small variations in environmental temperature.
- Heterotherms: Combine characteristics of ectotherms and endotherms.
Soil and Climate
Fertility: Characterized by biomass production capacity. It depends on the complex texture and water exchange properties.
Climate: Long-term statistics of characters that describe the atmospheric conditions of a locality. Specify precision and signal its distribution throughout the year. Classify aridity. Find it as the index of average annual temperature, the distribution of maximum and minimum temperatures. The temperature range would indicate how the summers and winters are. Coastal climate > smaller thermal amplitudes and inland climate > larger amplitudes.
Climate Analysis Example
Precipitation (Precip): The evolution of irregularities. Bars indicate two maximums, one in the winter season (January to December) and another in spring (April), and a minimum in July during the summer. It was never registered that there was no precipitation. It can be said that the average annual precipitation is very low, less than 300mm, and this can lead to a water deficit for plants.
Temperature (T): The annual average temperature is high. Summers are hot and winters are cool.
Comment: We are dealing with a climate with low and erratic precipitation, concentrated in a few days. There are two maximums per year because there is no shortage of rain. The aridity is due to the prevailing weather situation of high pressure, with winds coming from the Atlantic. The annual average temperatures show no frost and are marked by high insolation and the arrival of warm Saharan winds. Mediterranean climate.
Vegetation: Low xerophytic type (spiny cactus), clearly adapted to prolonged aridity. Steppe vegetation and garrigue (scrubland) can appear. Although oak forests may also be present, they are often very degraded. The soils are sandy, dry, and hard, lacking organic matter, which causes a lack of vegetation. There is a water deficit area due to erosion, as the rivers are dry for most of the year.
Soil Complex
Exchange Complex: The part of the soil that has the capacity to exchange aqueous cations with solutions that run through it (clays and humus).
Humic-Clay Complex: Controls the mobility of nutrients. Micelles are loaded positively, forming cation exchange points on the outside.
Field Capacity: The quantity of water that the soil can retain against the effect of gravity, which causes water to move downwards.