Question

Describe an ecosystem and a food web in that ecosystem. Specifically detail how ONE of the four biogeochemical cycles (hydrologic, carbon, nitrogen, or phosphorus) works in your ecosystem. Include sources, sinks and processes that move the nutrient in your ecosystem. You should also include how energy flows through the ecosystem.

Answer 1

The chosen biogeochemical cycles is nitrogen. The ecosystem is compose of plants that absorb the nitrogen from the nutrients in the soil, and the soil could be consider our main source of this nutrient, where the plants can obtain it as nitrate, and will acumulate it as ammonium.Then, herbivores and omnivorous are going to eat the plants and digest the nitrogen in them.In this case the energy will flow from the plants to animals. Then, the animal could expel the nitrogen as urea, it could get eating by another animal or it could die. The animals could be consider as sinks in this cycle. In any case, the nitrogen would come back to the soil, where the decomposers like fungus will convert this nitrogen in ammonium. The energy will flow from the animals to the decomposers. Later, bacterias will be in charge of changing the ammonium to nitrates by nitrification. The energy will flow from the decomposers to the bacteria. Finally, the plants could absorb again the nitrogen, or another set of bacterias could convert it in atmospheric nitrogen.