How Many Animals Are In The Tundra

TUNDRA

The tundra is a biome characterized by an extremely cold climate, little precipitation, poor nutrients, and a brusk growing season. Other characteristics include depression biodiversity, elementary plants, limited drainage, and big variations in populations.

In that location are two types of tundra: arctic and alpine. Arctic tundra is located in the Northern Hemisphere; tall tundra is located at high elevations on mountains throughout the earth. Tundra is also establish to a express extent in Antarctica – specifically, the Antarctic Peninsula.

Chill TUNDRA

Arctic tundra is establish along the northern coasts of N America, Asia, and Europe, and in parts of Greenland. It extends south to the edge of the taiga (a biome characterized by coniferous forests). The division between the forested taiga and the treeless tundra is known as the timberline or tree line.

Location of arctic tundra across the Northern Hemisphere. Image courtesy of Wikimedia.

The tundra is known for cold atmospheric condition, with an average winter temperature of -30 degrees F (-34 degrees C), and an average summertime temperature ranging from 37 degrees to 54 degrees F (iii degrees to 12 degrees C). The growing flavor lasts from 50 to 60 days. The biome is also characterized by desertlike conditions, with an average of half-dozen to ten inches (15 to 25 cm) of yearly atmospheric precipitation, including snowfall melt. Winds often achieve speeds of 30 to 60 miles (48 to 97 km) an hour.

Another authentication of the tundra is permafrost, a layer of permanently frozen subsoil and partially decayed organic matter. Only the superlative nine or x inches of soil thaw, leading to the formation of bogs and ponds each spring.

Ice wedges in the permafrost can crack and crusade the formation of polygonal footing. This flick also illustrates the formation of ponds equally the snowfall melts each bound. Photo courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wild animals Service.

Tundra and taiga permafrost stores well-nigh one-third of the world's soil-bound carbon. Warming Chill temperatures due to climatic change are causing the permafrost to thaw, releasing the carbon in the class of carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas). Additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will intensify warming, leading to increased thawing and the release of even more carbon dioxide. This positive feedback loop thus has the potential to significantly increase the charge per unit and effects of climate change.

Approximately 1,700 species of vascular plants are found beyond the Arctic tundra, including flowering plants, low shrubs, sedges, grasses, and liverworts. Lichens, mosses, and algae are also common. In full general, tundra plants are low growing, have shallow root systems, and are capable of carrying out photosynthesis at low temperatures and with low low-cal intensities.

Animals establish in the Arctic tundra include herbivorous mammals (lemmings, voles, caribou, arctic hares, and squirrels), carnivorous mammals (arctic foxes, wolves, and polar bears), fish (cod, flatfish, salmon, and trout), insects (mosquitoes, flies, moths, grasshoppers, and blackflies), and birds (ravens, snow buntings, falcons, loons, sandpipers, terns, and gulls). Reptiles and amphibians are absent considering of the extremely common cold temperatures. While many of the mammals have adaptations that enable them to survive the long cold winters and to breed and raise young quickly during the brusk summers, most birds and some mammals migrate south during the winter. Migration means that Arctic populations are in continual flux.

A generalized nutrient spider web for the Arctic tundra begins with the various plant species (producers). Herbivores (chief consumers) such every bit pikas, musk oxen, caribou, lemmings, and arctic hares brand up the side by side rung. Omnivores and carnivores (secondary consumers) such as arctic foxes, brown bears, arctic wolves, and snowy owls top the web. Bacteria and fungi play the important part of breaking down organic matter and returning nutrients to the soil for re-use. Of course, the verbal species involved in this spider web vary depending on the geographic location.

A generalized tundra nutrient web. Exact relationships and species depend on geographic location.

The interconnected nature of a nutrient spider web means that as numbers of ane species increment (or decrease), other populations change in response. An often-discussed tundra example is the lemming population. Lemmings are small-scale rodents that feed on plants. Populations of lemmings fluctuate radically (from large populations to near extinction) in regular intervals. While scientists believed that populations of lemming predators (foxes, owls, skuas, and stoats) also fluctuated in response to these changes, there is now evidence that suggests that the predators themselves drive the changes in lemming populations.

Climate change is affecting tundra ecosystems in many ways. Thawing permafrost not only releases carbon dioxide merely too leads to coastal erosion– an increasing trouble in Alaska where villages are at risk. Warming likewise means that seasons are arriving earlier – a shift not simply in temperatures only as well in the emergence and flowering of plants. Biologists suspect that a mismatch between plant availability and calving is increasing mortality rates of caribou calves. Finally, species distributions may change every bit birds and other animals shift their range or migration patterns in response to irresolute temperatures.

ANTARCTIC TUNDRA

Much less extensive than Arctic tundra, Antarctic tundra is found on the Antarctic Peninsula and several Antarctic and subantarctic islands. These areas have rocky soil that supports minimal plant life: 2 flowering plant species, mosses, algae, and lichens. Antarctic tundra does not support mammals, but marine mammals and birds inhabit areas near the coast. All species in Antarctica and the Antarctic Islands (s of 60 degrees S latitude) are protected by the Antarctic Treaty.

LINKS

The Globe's Biomes
An overview of biomes and information on six major types: freshwater, marine, desert, wood, grassland, and tundra.

Biomes and Ecosystems
General information about biomes and ecosystems, with links to pages near tundra, taiga, temperate forest, tropical rainforest, desert, grassland, and ocean biomes. This site may also be used with upper-elementary students.

Geography4Kids: Biosphere
Includes pages on ecology, ecosystems, food chains, populations, and country biomes. Appropriate for use with upper-elementary students.

NATIONAL Science EDUCATION STANDARDS: Science CONTENT STANDARDS

The entire National Science Education Standards document can exist read online or downloaded for free from the National Academies Printing web site. The post-obit excerpt was taken from Chapter 6.

Teaching about biomes (including the tundra) can run into a wide variety of fundamental concepts and principles, including:

Thou-4 Life Science

The Characteristics of Organisms

Organisms have basic needs. For example, animals demand air, h2o, and food; plants crave air, water, nutrients, and light. Organisms tin survive merely in environments in which their needs can be met. The globe has many different environments, and singled-out environments support the life of unlike types of organisms.

Organisms and their Environments

All animals depend on plants. Some animals eat plants for food. Other animals eat animals that eat the plants.
An organism'due south patterns of behavior are related to the nature of that organism's environment, including the kinds and numbers of other organisms nowadays, the availability of food and resource, and the concrete characteristics of the surroundings. When the environment changes, some plants and animals survive and reproduce, and others dice or move to new locations.
All organisms cause changes in the environment in which they live. Some of these changes are detrimental to the organism or other organisms, whereas others are benign.
Humans depend on their natural and constructed environments. Humans change environments in ways that can be either beneficial or detrimental for themselves and other organisms.

Yard-4 Science in Personal and Social Perspectives

Changes in Environments

Environments are the infinite, weather condition, and factors that affect an individual'south and a population's ability to survive and their quality of life.
Changes in environments can be natural or influenced by humans. Some changes are good, some are bad, and some are neither good nor bad. Pollution is a modify in the surround that tin influence the health, survival, or activities of organisms, including humans.
Some ecology changes occur slowly, and others occur quickly. Students should sympathize the dissimilar consequences of changing environments in minor increments over long periods every bit compared with changing environments in large increments over short periods.

5-8 Life Science

Populations and Ecosystems

A population consists of all individuals of a species that occur together at a given identify and fourth dimension. All populations living together and the physical factors with which they interact compose an ecosystem.
Populations of organisms tin can exist categorized by the function they serve in an ecosystem. Plants and some microorganisms are producers – they make their own food. All animals, including humans, are consumers, which obtain food by eating other organisms. Decomposers, primarily bacteria and fungi, are consumers that employ waste material materials and dead organisms for food. Food webs identify the relationships among producers, consumers, and decomposers in an ecosystem.
For ecosystems, the major source of energy is sunlight. Energy entering ecosystems as sunlight is transferred by producers into chemic free energy through photosynthesis. That energy then passes from organism to organism in food webs.
The number of organisms an ecosystem can support depends on the resources available and abiotic factors, such equally quantity of light and h2o, range of temperatures, and soil composition. Given adequate biotic and abiotic resource and no disease or predators, populations (including humans) increase at rapid rates. Lack of resource and other factors, such as predation and climate, limit the growth of populations in specific niches in the ecosystem.

five-eight Science in Personal and Social Perspectives

Populations, Resource, and Environments

When an expanse becomes overpopulated, the environment volition become degraded due to the increased use of resource.
Causes of ecology degradation and resource depletion vary from region to region and from country to country.

Natural Hazards

Internal and external processes of the earth system crusade natural hazards, events that alter or destroy homo and wildlife habitats, damage property, and harm or kill humans. Natural hazards include earthquakes, landslides, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, floods, storms, and even possible impacts of asteroids.
Human activities besides can induce hazards through resource acquisition, urban growth, land-utilise decisions, and waste disposal. Such activities can accelerate many natural changes.

This article was written by Jessica Chips-Gaither. For more information, run across the Contributors page. Email Kimberly Lightle, Principal Investigator, with any questions about the content of this site.

Copyright March 2009 – The Ohio Land Academy. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation nether Grant No. 0733024. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this textile are those of the writer(south) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. This work is licensed nether an Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons license .

Source: https://beyondpenguins.ehe.osu.edu/issue/tundra-life-in-the-polar-extremes/life-in-the-tundra

Posted by: wolfgodis1942.blogspot.com