This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Soil quality is crucial to sustaining agriculture and maintaining food security. Soil ecosystems involve complex interactions between biological communities, such as microbes, and physicochemical variables, but although living organisms can affect soil health, they are often ignored in soil management systems, running the risk that we won’t detect detrimental impacts of our actions on the soil until it is too late. A recent study shed new light on bacteria living in soil ecosystems. Researchers examined the composition of bacterial communities and physicochemical properties in 3,000 soil samples from 606 sites in New Zealand, covering indigenous forests, exotic forest plantations, horticultural areas, and pastoral grasslands. Their results showed that soil bacteria community composition was strongly tied to land use. Soil properties such as pH, nutrient concentration, and bulk density could be predicted by the bacterial communities present in the soil..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Heavy-metal mines might be a tough environment to grow up in, but many microbes call them home, including viruses. A recent look at core samples from a lead and zinc mine in China revealed how viruses fit into this extreme ecosystem. Environmental factors like acidity appeared to play a big role in shaping viral communities. High acidity tends to make environments less hospitable, even for organisms that live in extreme places. That explains why less acidic (higher pH) core samples contained more viruses. Similarly, viral gene function varied with depth. Deeper and less environmentally extreme layers contained genes with conventional functions related to metabolism and structure, while surface layers largely contained genes of unknown function. Tests also detected genes that viruses might use to get their bacterial hosts to incorporate sulfur from mine runoff..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

Learn how important the honey bee's body structure is to survival in the hive.What if there were no bees? How would it affect our grassland animals? How would it affect humans? This learning module offers insight into the problems that countless animals and plants face with the potential loss of the bees. Discover just how important this tiny species is to the food web of this ecosystem.This module could be incorporated into a larger environmental science module.This lesson includes learning objectives, material and resource lists, background information, activities,  videos, writing assignments, a game, assessments, and support documents. See the Educator's Guide for more video links and recommended readings. Remix of: 1.Create a Bee Hummer, Science Snacks Exploratorium 2. What If There Were No Bees? A Bee Cause Project 3. Hive Alive! Bee Bodies

Using actual wildlife injury data from a local wildlife rescue center, students learn what animal species have been injured and the causes of injury. Students use spreadsheet software to sort, organize, and evaluate their findings for recommendations to reduce human-caused injury to wildlife. Students prepare and present a summary of their findings and recommendations to the local Audubon Society, The Humane Society, neighborhood associations, and other interested groups. At the end of each public presentation, students gather public reaction to the data and collect ideas on how to reduce injury to wildlife. These recommendations are compiled into a newsletter and wiki for dissemination to a wider audience.

This unit plan was originally developed by the Intel® Teach program as an exemplary unit plan demonstrating some of the best attributes of teaching with technology.

Students are introduced to the concept of a dam and its potential benefits, which include water supply, electricity generation, flood control, recreation and irrigation. This lesson begins an ongoing classroom scenario in which student engineering teams working for the Splash Engineering firm design dams for a fictitious client, Thirsty County.

Students will be exploring the idea of ecosystems and wildfires. They will become familiar with what an ecosystem is and how to keep them healthy. Students will also see the positive and negative effects of wildfires on ecosystems. Also how wildfires influence the local government and federal government when it comes to land management.

Students experience civil and environmental engineering by planning a housing development in an existing biome, while also protecting the native species that live there. They conduct research, draw plans, make brochures and give presentations, with each team having a member serving as a project manager, civil engineer, environmental engineer and graphic designer. The best designs creatively balance the needs and resources necessary to support both the native species and human infrastructure.

Students perform a macroinvertebrate survey to gauge the health of a local river. They collect water samples and count macroinvertebrates to learn how the health of a river's ecosystem can be determined by its river insect population.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Although lakes cover less than 1% of the Earth’s surface, they are an essential component in the planet’s carbon cycle. But there are striking regional differences in the degree of carbon cycling that occurs in lakes, and the underlying causes aren’t well known. To improve understanding of these differences, an international research team has proposed a geographic framework to connect carbon processing at the ecosystem level with regional drivers such as climate, land cover, and human activity. Based on this framework, they’ve described two mechanisms that explain geographic differences in carbon cycling, providing new insight into the role of inland waters in the broader global carbon cycle. The first mechanism proposes that regional differences in lake carbon cycling are linked to whether water color exceeds a threshold level. Where these levels fall in relation to this threshold affects ecosystem patterns, such as lake metabolic status..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Describe the basic types of ecosystems on EarthExplain the methods that ecologists use to study ecosystem structure and dynamicsIdentify the different methods of ecosystem modelingDifferentiate between food chains and food webs and recognize the importance of each