Terrestrial and Aquatic Biomes

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Okay, so we're now on the next topic and we now go to a higher level of organization and we'll
now discuss about biomes of the world. So for this part, we'll look into more of the differences
between the different biomes that we see around the world and we'll look further into the
intersections of the different spheres. Okay, so for this topic, the learning outcomes are the
following.

The first one is to enumerate the different terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and biomes and
to identify the characteristics and also to give examples of each ecosystem and biome. So when
we talk about the biome, the biome is considered as the largest geographic biotic unit. It is
within a large geographic area containing similar plants and animals.

They contain, of course, major types of ecosystems that cover a large area or large areas of the
earth and are classified by their dominant vegetation types. We can distinguish a biome based
on the characteristics of the local factors. For example, when we look at a desert biome, there
could be subtypes or we can have it as a hot, cold, and coastal deserts, each with significantly or
slightly different climates.

So biomes would be having similar climates and ecosystems and this map shows the locations
of some of the major biomes of the world that we will be discussing today. So we'll have the
eight biomes here, tropical rainforest, tropical savanna, desert, chaparral, grassland, temperate
deciduous forest, temperate boreal forest, and the arctic and alpine tundra. So the key question
is, how are terrestrial biomes formed? Climate is quite a major factor in forming biomes,
especially in controlling which living organisms would be surviving and living in that specific
biome.

Climate is affected by latitude for one, it's a big factor affecting climate. The farther one is from
the equator, the colder the temperature gets. So many biomes are distributed along very
distinct lines of latitude.

Say for example, the deserts would be typically found between 30 degrees north or south of
latitude. Another factor is elevation. It affects climate as when we have a higher elevation, the
colder the temperature gets.

Biomes that are said to be closer to the poles may be also found on top of mountains near the
equator because of the similarity in environmental factors. Typically, a climb of 100 feet in
elevation is equivalent to traveling around 600 miles northward. The plants that are said to be
living in cold climates have adapted, of course, to the cold.

And they are significantly different from the ones surviving in warm climates. As a result, with
similar climates, say for a global scale, they have similar biotic communities and are therefore
considered as the same biome. So in a tropical environment in higher elevations, like in the
mountains, you will have plants or even some animals that would be quite similar to organisms
that you find in low elevation temperate climates.

Maybe not the same species, but more or less the characteristics of organisms are the same.
Distribution is also affected by physical environmental factors such as temperature, water,
wind, and substrate. Terrestrial biomes are often vertically stratified and maintained by
disturbance.

Stratifications, for one, are defined by different size plants such as in the forest, you have the
upper canopy of tall trees, you have the low tall tree layer, the main canopy, you have the shrub
layer, and you also have the ground layer for the herbaceous plants. Then way below, you have
the litter and of course the root zone. For example, in the vegetation in all deserts worldwide
are characterized by extensive root system.

They are capable of long-term water storage capability, they have thick waxy coverings to
reduce water loss, and they have extremely small, if there are any, leaves, usually reduced to
spines. Disturbance, on the other hand, such as wildfires, are also essential factors in
maintaining many biomes, such as in grasslands, savannas, some coniferous forests, or
typically in chaparral. Fire favors trees such as longleaf pine, whose bark resists fire, and
grasses which recover quickly after burning.

So you have here a graph that shows you the average temperature for each and every major
terrestrial biome, along with the amount of precipitation observed in each biome. So if you see
here, the average temperature in a rain forest would be quite high, and the average amount of
rainfall is also high, compared to a grassland with very low temperature, and almost nearing
more or less to the zero degree centigrade. Now the deserts will also have very high
temperature wide span, but you have the rainfall quite low, at just 15 millimeters average
rainfall.

Now, by this, we have the basic, but how many terrestrial biomes are there really? The number
of biomes is different among scientists. For our purposes, we'll focus only on these eight
terrestrial biomes. They are pretty standard, but relatively generic.

It is possible to divide this into smaller biomes, like Arctic and Alpine tundra. Each biome is also
populated by a diverse array of animals, fungi, and microorganisms adapted to that
environment. Actual species in a biome have undergone what we term as a conversion
revolution.

Okay, so let's start with the tropical rain forest with more than 200 centimeter annual rainfall
and a temperature averaging around 25 degrees centigrade. Around as many as 50% of the
world's animal species may be found in the TRF. And 80% biomass of the land vegetation.

The tropical rainforest comprise around 6% of the land area that we have, and 2.5 billion
hectares are considered still, until now, as closed forests. In terms of areas, Indonesia contains
around 50%, hopefully still active this now, followed by Brazil, by the Amazon forest, you have
18% in India, and 30% of China is said to be still a forested area. The key factor that would affect
the formation of tropical rainforest would be the temperature and water availability.

And these are the two big drivers for determining the forest type. There's vertical stratifications,
you have epiphytes being many in a tropical rainforest. The rainfall would definitely determine
the life in a tropical rainforest, as we have faster material cycling in the area.

Fire is also important for opening gaps or for opening patches and gaps inside the forest and
allowing the herbaceous growth, the one on the forest floor to proliferate during this time.
There are around common three types of rainforest would be the tropical and the dry
rainforests. You have the semi-visible and there are also dry rainforests, dry forests, rather.

Okay, so this is the stratifications. Okay, the next two ones are the tropical savanna and
grassland. The one you see here now is a tropical savanna.

They have very hot temperatures, both in the dry and wet season. The fire is quite important in
a savanna as it enhances diversity. Like in this case, there is a picture.

The one below is a picture of a woodland savanna because you have more of the small trees
compared to the grassland. So we also have the grassland savanna. It's a savanna area, but you
have more of the shrubs, shrubland savanna like that.

It contains some grasslands with very few scattered trees and it contains the highest diversity
of the grazing animals. Like in Africa, you have all the different ungulates there. The deer, the
elephants, the zebras.

Then you have for the grassland, the temperature. The range is to be from negative 40 degrees
centigrade to 38 degrees centigrade. So you see here the very far difference of the temperature
during day and night time.

So the range is quite wide. Rainfall is around 50 to 90 centimeters annual with little
precipitation during the cold winters and hot summers. So it's predominantly, of course,
grasses with very few trees, almost nil, and it has dry climate.

Trees are typically found in fringes that it's quite near already to the transition to a forest
environment. It's also near water sources such as streams. A grassland is also marked by
seasonal drought and fires to prevent free growth.

And you will also see the same as tropical savanna, some grazing racers, but these are quite
large animals. The next one is the chaparral. Chaparral is found at 30 to 40 degrees latitude
with around 35 to 70 centimeter average rainfall.

Extremely resistant to drought and weather events, and they have what we call a very, very
dense and spiny evergreen shrubs. As you can see here in the lower left picture, it's spiny, it's
quite green, and it's bright, it's quite dense. There are mild rainy winters and long, hot, dry
summers.

The general characteristic that would separate chaparral with the others, the fires in chaparral
are quite periodic, so it's more common to be affected by fire. Unlike in the forest and
grassland, fire would not really be that frequent, but in chaparral, it's periodic. So some plants
require fire for seeds to germinate, so they have already adopted that they will be able to
germinate only once they are affected by fire.

Deserts, on the other hand, similar to a grassland area, has also a wide difference of
temperature. You have negative 15 degrees centigrade to 38 degrees centigrade. Well, okay, let
me go back for this.

For grassland, the temperature is quite wide because you have a temperate grassland in a
tropical grassland. With respect to desert, the desert is really typically in the lower latitude. So
the average temperature is around 20 to 25 degrees centigrade, and rainfall is less than 30
centimeters per year.

The plants and animals here are adopted for water storage, of course, and conservation like
cacti, so common in cacti, and you have plants becoming big near oasis. And then, of course,
the largest forest patch in the world is the temperate boreal or also known as the conifer forest.
It's the largest terrestrial biome for reasons that, one, the largest tree on earth would be found
in this type of environment, the sequoia tree.

The area could be as big as having 20 people holding hands together and standing around the
tree, 20 or 25 people. So typically found between 45 degrees and 60 degrees north latitude, the
precipitation is quite moderate with 40 to 100 cm per year. Of course, one main characteristic
of taiga would be having snow, mainly snow.

The precipitation is mainly snow. It has cold winters and severe snow. So the growth seasons
are said to be quite short during the summer months, very, very short growth season.

There are very few reptiles here because of the very cold environment. And you'll find most of
the old growth forests in this area, but it's quite saddening as it's rapidly decreasing. It usually
receives, the forest here usually receives lots of moisture as rain or snow.

So they are the biggest and we call it either taiga, temperate boreal, or conifer forest. Okay.
And then, of course, finally, the eighth type is tundra.

It is the biome that is characterized by permafrost, the presence of permafrost. The word
tundra means treeless or marshy plain. So by the name, there's no tree growing in the area.

The temperature average is negative 34 degrees centigrade to negative 10 degrees centigrade

The permafrost is already found around less than a meter below. Sometimes in some areas, it's
just one foot of soil and then you have the permafrost already underneath. It has a bitter cold
and high winds.

That's why trees will not really be able to grow because you already have the ice beneath. And
then you have very high winds and cold wind. It encompasses around 20% of the land surface
area of the earth since you have the Arctic and the alpine tundra.

The winters are long, harsh. The summers would be very short and very little precipitation is
observed. So the ground is, because of the permafrost, the ground is usually wet because of
evaporation.

However, the key thing that we observe now in tundra, they are the ones severely affected by
global warming. It has been observed that there are a lot of the permafrost, which are not
already permanently frosted. It's not ice anymore.

The increasing temperature of the earth have melted the ice and it has causing a lot of
sinkholes. Remember, we have the ice capable of expanding. So once you turn water into ice, it
expands.

But once it is liquefied, it causes now subduction. And that subduction creates accidents for
animals falling into these areas where subductions are. And it's a key problem now being
observed.

Marami ng mga sinkholes in the tundra environment. Okay, so those are the eight. Now we go
to the aquatic biome.

In the aquatic biome, it covers around 75% of the earth's surface. They are less influenced by
climate than terrestrial biomes because water is more thermally stable. These biomes are often
stratified by light and water.

As mentioned before, in the first start of the semester, the aquatic environment is considered
as a shaded environment. The light intensity, of course, decreases with depth. Similar to
terrestrial biomes, aquatic biomes are also vertically stratified.

We have what we call the photic zone where light would still pass through and a photic zone
where you have little light. Aquatic biomes are divided into two. The freshwater with the lakes,
rivers, streams, ponds, and wetlands.

And the marine such as the open ocean, estuary, the coral reef, barrier island, shallow ocean or
shallow bays, mangrove forests, ocean pelagic zones, intertidal zones, and benthic zones. These
are the marine part. But we will only discuss the ones as listed in the figure, the lake rivers,
estuaries, intertidal zones, coral reefs, ocean pelagic, and the abyssal zones.
Okay, so let's look at them one by one. The first one would be the lakes. It is classified by, the
lakes are classified by nutrients, either oligotrophic, which are deeper and said to be nutrient
poor, while you have the eutrophic, which is said to be shallow and nutrient rich.

The nutrient poorness of oligotrophic lakes would be, you will not observe very high algal
productivity unlike in the eutrophic lakes where you have high algal productivity because of the
richness of the water layer. So since you have high algal productivity, high organic nutrients in
the eutrophic lakes, the water is said to be murky. It's not clear in the oxygen in the water.

The dissolved oxygen is quite poor, unlike in the oligotrophic lake. Now an example of a
eutrophic lake would be the Laguna de Bay. A eutrophic stream would be your passive river.

For oligotrophic lakes, you have the Taal Lake still being oligotrophic. The eutrophism here is
caused, of course, by a lot of inputs. And Laguna de Bay is affected by inputs coming from
Laguna, Rizal, and even parts of Metro Manila.

So you have a lot of not only agricultural fertilizers, but a lot of inputs coming from the different
canals or tributaries, the pollutants coming from the tributaries of Laguna de Bay. The next
ones are the rivers and streams. Organisms need adaptation so that they are not swept away
by the moving water.

It's heavily affected by, of course, by man changing the course of flow. Say if we create dams or
if we create channels to straighten the flow. We also use river systems to dispose our waste.

This one, the picture on the left, shows you a meandering river stream. River or stream. This is
caused by the rapid water flow.

It will continuously scrape the water until such time that you create now, instead of meander,
you will create now a straight stream. It happens naturally, but human beings would be
influencing that process in a fast way. The wetlands, on the other hand, are areas covered with
water.

It supports plants and they are among the richest biomes with respect to biodiversity and
productivity. Wetlands include marshes, bugs, swamps, and seasonal ponds. Very few are now
existing as they are thought to often be a waste because wetlands release a lot of methane.

So there's a distinct smell. But wetlands are typically the stopover of a lot of migrating birds,
like in the Candaba swamp area. It's an area where you have the stopover of a lot of bird
species.

Then you have the mangrove forest. Although, quote unquote, you have the forest name here,
the mangrove area is placed under aquatic biomes since they are more submerged in a aquatic
condition rather than land. There are several types of mangroves, but typically they are, of
course, underwater.
So you have the mangrove area functioning mainly as a buffer zone. It helps us buffer zone in
terms of typhoon or if you have water surges. And it's a home for a lot of fingerlings.

So it's an area where animals or fish could lay their eggs and you have very high diversity also
in mangrove areas. While the estuary, the estuary is a meeting place of the freshwater stream
or river that would merge with the ocean so that we know that the river stream doesn't have
salt. So in the ocean, the salinity is quite high.

So this estuary is at the middle. So the salinity in this area is at the middle and you can easily
feel the change in temperature. From the stream, the temperature is quite higher than the one
you feel for the ocean environment.

The estuary is quite a highly productive biome since it's quite important for fisheries and
feeding places for waterfowl. So the estuary is the connection of the freshwater to the marine
world. And then this is what I have mentioned a while ago regarding the vertical stratification in
aquatic environment.

You have the upper photic zone as you see here at the light blue and the bluer one is the
aphotic zone, which is said to be sparsely populated. The photic zone, even though it is quite
shallow, it supports photosynthesis. Even the ocean photic zone is quite narrow, but it contains
most of the organisms.

So you have here the neuritic zone, as you can see the left and at the right side, you see now
the oceanic zone. Then you have the intertidal zone, which I will mention in a while. The benthic
zone, as you can see here, contains the bottom organisms, which often depend on rain of dead
organic matter or debris coming from the terrestrial environment or from above.

So this is the zoonation. As you can see here, there are already several biomes here as
indicated, even though they are quite connected. You have the intertidal zone, you have the
benthic zone, you have the phylogenic zone and you have the abyssal zone.

Now, in terms of population, the topmost is highly populated, sparsely in the middle and the
detritus would be at the bottom. Okay, so now the area that's quite equivalent to the rainforest
in terms of productivity would be this, you have the coral reef. But before we reach the coral
reef, you have to see first the intertidal zone.

Intertidal zones are alternately submerged and exposed on a daily cycle of tides. They are quite
often polluted by oil that decreases biodiversity. So in this case, you have a lot of diversity here
as you have observed during the field rate.

Coral reef areas occur in the Norithic zone of warm tropical water dominated by cnidarians and
it's quite, cnidarians are corals, it's quite productive and it protects the land from storms.
However, the degree increase of global temperature have caused a lot of the corals dying out.
We call it coral bleaching.
So most are now dying from rising global temperatures. That's a key problem and they are
quite successful in rehabilitating some but the speed of death of a lot of corals is quite fast. So
we need to do something about it.

Okay, so these are the most productive in terms of fish and of course the plant life. And finally,
this two area you have the ocean pelagic and the abyss. So the ocean pelagic zone, it's quite
wide and it contains a lot of the animals or organisms and it's away from the shore.

The abyssal zone is the lowest part of the ventos and you will see here also the deep sea vents,
hydrothermal vents where you'll see a lot of the chemo-anthropic organisms. In this vents, it's
the one they have theorized to be the source of the life on earth. When you have the chemo-
arthropods, in this case, those are those animals that are capable of living off high amount of
sulphurs.

We started with sulphur bacteria, the ones who can digest sulphur and then produce food for
higher organisms. So through chemo-arthropods. So the energy is not really coming from light
but the chemicals released from the mind.

The abyss also contains a lot of organisms and a lot of these are still unknown since we really
cannot reach the bottom most part yet of the oceans because of the extreme pressure. We
already have some area that we are capable to go into. So with that topic, we'll have the next
one.

Okay, we will be discussing the next one, next topic on systems ecology. Thank you very much.

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