8.3: Part 1- Nature Walk Observations instructions

Going on a nature walk is a great opportunity to apply your knowledge and skills in a real-world setting.

Look at a map of your campus to identify the trail to be taken and identify potential areas of interest before you set foot outside.

OR

Choose a location: Pick a park, nature trail, or other natural area that you want to explore. Make sure the location is safe and suitable for the type of observations you want to make.

1. Gather your supplies: You will need a notebook, pen or pencil, thermometer, hand lens (or other magnifying device), and a camera or smartphone to take pictures of what you observe. You can also bring a field guide or app (such as Seek or Google Lens) to help identify plants and animals.
2. Start your walk: As you walk, look around and pay attention to the various plants, fungi, and animals in the area. Make note of the different types of vegetation and their growth patterns, as well as the different species of animals and their behaviors.
3. Make observations: Record your observations in your notebook, including descriptions of the physical characteristics of the plants and animals, as well as their behaviors and interactions with each other. Also, take pictures of anything interesting that you want to remember. You can insert these pictures into your notebook later.
4. Identify what you observe: Use a field guide or app to identify the plants and animals you see. Write down the names of the species you observe in your notebook, along with any other relevant information such as their classification and habitat.
5. Look for patterns: Look for patterns in your observations, such as the relationship between the types of vegetation and the species of animals present. Consider how the environment affects the habitat, behavior, and interactions of plants and animals.
6. Make hypotheses: Based on your observations, formulate hypotheses about the relationships between the different components of the ecosystem and how they may be affected by environmental factors such as temperature, rainfall, and light.
7. Analyze your data: After your nature walk, analyze your data and draw conclusions based on your observations and hypotheses. Consider how your findings relate to the larger scientific community's understanding of the ecosystem and its components.
8. Present your findings (optional): Present your findings to your classmates or submit a report to your teacher. Discuss the implications of your observations for the broader understanding of the ecosystem and the environment.

Activities for after the walk

Draw a food web including organisms that you saw in the same area, interacting together. Make sure to include a producer, at least two levels of consumers, and a decomposer. Label which organisms are autotrophs and which are heterotrophs. Use arrows to show how energy is transferred and lost throughout this web.

Figure 1. Example food web (CCBY 4.0 Kestin Schulz, Mariya W. Smit, Lydie Herfort and Holly M. Simon. The image (amended) was provided courtesy of the Missouri Department of Conservation.)

Food web drawing. Try to draw this somewhat as you saw it. For example, trees rooted in soil, bug on a leaf that is attached to grass, fungus growing from the ground, etc. Draw black arrows from the thing that might be eaten to the thing doing the eating.

What is the ultimate source of energy for your food web?

What happens to this energy as it moves through the food web? Where does it end up?

In drawing your food web, you depicted a combination of the flow of energy and the cycling of nutrients through an ecosystem. Whereas energy has an input and an output, nutrients are continually recycled. These elements often cycle between the biotic and abiotic components in an ecosystem.

For example, water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Water molecules precipitate from the atmosphere and fall as rain, saturating the soil. A plant absorbs those molecules through its roots, transporting them up to its leaves. Some of these water molecules will be broken apart during the process of photosynthesis, the oxygen exiting the plant as O2.

O2 is gas that you will breathe in, while the hydrogen removed from the water might be used to form molecules of glucose that you will eat. The water not being broken apart exits the plant through its leaves, evaporating back into the atmosphere in a process called transpiration. The oxygen atoms that you breathed in will be used to release energy from your food (cellular respiration) and be joined back to hydrogen molecules to once again form water. This water might exit your body as vapor on your breath or as perspiration and return directly to the atmosphere. It might also soak into your clothes as sweat or exit as urine, be processed in a wastewater facility, then sent out to the ocean where it will evaporate back into the atmosphere.

Oxygen and carbon cycles through different processes. (CCBY 4.0 Wikimedia Commons as a contribution from an Art&Design School thanks of a collaboration between Llotja and Amical Wikimedia.)

The atoms of hydrogen and oxygen are broken apart and reassembled into other molecules multiple times in this process, but the overall outcome is a cycle, with atoms traveling between the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere, but rarely ever exiting our Earth system.

Using a blue pen or pencil, diagram the flow of water through the ecosystem around you in the food web you drew.

What is the role of plants in the global cycling of water?

Each species in an ecosystem is considered a population. This represents a group of actually or potentially interbreeding organisms and is an important area of study for both ecologists and geneticists. When multiple species in an ecosystem are considered together, this is called a community. For example, a forest could be composed of a single population of maple trees, but it is more likely to be a community, including other tree species like oak and pine, and animals like the whitetail deer or rainbow trout. All living organisms are considered to be a part of the community in a given ecosystem.

What is the difference between a community and an ecosystem?