7 public questions tagged with this topic.
Food webs include decomposers, which play a crucial role in nutrient cycling and ecosystem balance.
Ref: NCERT Class 12 Biology Chapter 12: Ecosystem Nutrient Cycling - Carbon Phosphorus and Ecological Succession
Food webs include decomposers, which play a crucial role in nutrient cycling and maintaining ecosystem balance.
Ref: NCERT Class 12 Biology Chapter 12: Ecosystem Nutrient Cycling - Carbon Phosphorus and Ecological Succession
Food webs include decomposers, which play a crucial role in recycling nutrients.
Ref: NCERT Class 12 Biology Chapter 12: Ecosystem Decomposition - Process and Factors
Food webs depict multiple interconnected food chains, showing complex feeding relationships within an ecosystem.
Ref: NCERT Class 12 Biology Chapter 11: Organisms and Populations Population Interactions - Competition - Competitive Exclusion
Decomposers are essential in food webs as they break down dead organisms and recycle nutrients.
Ref: NCERT Class 12 Biology Chapter 11: Organisms and Populations Adaptations - Morphological Physiological Behavioural
“Lower complexity with richness” for connectance indicates. This relationship follows from the ecological mechanism represented by the terms in the item, not merely from an association between their names. Rates depend on temperature, moisture, substrate quality, consumer physiology, and the elemental balance between organisms and their food. These controls explain why the same process can differ among terrestrial, freshwater, and marine systems without changing its definition. The remaining alternatives—“Higher complexity with higher richness”, “No relation”, “Random variation”—refer to different states, processes, or scales and therefore do not express the same causal relationship. Ecosystem processes are constrained by energy conservation and by the cycling of matter. Energy enters mainly through primary production, is lost as metabolic heat at every transfer, and therefore cannot be recycled in the way that carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, or water can. Linking the wording to measurable consequences for fitness, abundance, or flux gives the conclusion its scientific meaning and prevents a purely mnemonic interpretation.
Ref: Ecology: From Individuals to Ecosystems, Begon et al., 5th Ed., Ch. 17-19
Food-web connectance is the proportion of realised feeding links among all possible links. As species richness increases, the number of possible pairwise interactions rises approximately with the square of species number, whereas each consumer usually interacts with only a limited subset. Consequently connectance often decreases with richness even if the absolute number of links increases. The pattern depends on sampling and web definition, so it is an empirical tendency rather than an inviolable law. Mechanistic interpretation connects individual physiology and species interactions to population change, community composition, and ecosystem-level fluxes. Reliable inference requires the complete experimental design, definitions, units, and statistical evidence; missing labels cannot be reconstructed from an answer key alone. Net primary production equals gross primary production minus plant respiration and represents biomass or energy made available for growth and consumers. Rates must be compared on the same area, biomass, leaf-area, and time basis because changing the denominator can reverse an apparent ecosystem ranking.
Ref: Ecology: From Individuals to Ecosystems, Begon et al., 5th Ed., Ch. 17-19
