How did the lab activities help you answer the lesson
question: How do environmental changes affect both
living and nonliving things in a watershed?
conclusions can you make based on your observations?

 In the lab activity, I used a virtual watershed to demonstrate how pollutants enter and flow through the watershed. I constructed food chains to show how biotic factors are related. I also predicted and modeled how human activity affected the biotic factors in an ecosystem. Based on my observations, I can conclude that biotic and abiotic factors are closely linked and that human activity that changes the environment, like pollution, can affect all the other parts of an ecosystem in a negative way.

Explanation: Sample Response

only about ten percent of the energy at one trophic level is passed on to organisms at the next trophic level. the remainder of the energy is used in life processes or lost as heat.