UP:SC15.7.6

Students know:

Organisms, and populations of organisms, are dependent on their environmental interactions both with other living (biotic) things and with nonliving (abiotic) things.
In any ecosystem, organisms and populations with similar requirements for food, water, oxygen, or other resources may compete with each other for limited resources, access to which consequently constrains their growth and reproduction.
Growth of organisms and population increases are limited by access to resources.

Students are able to:

Organize the given data to allow for analysis and interpretation of relationships between resource availability and organisms in an ecosystem.
Analyze the organized data to determine the relationships between the size of a population, the growth and survival of individual organisms, and resource availability.
Determine whether the relationships provide evidence of a causal link between factors.
Interpret the organized data to make predictions based on evidence of causal relationships between resource availability, organisms, and organism populations.

Students understand that:

Cause and effect relationships may be used to predict phenomena in natural or designed systems.
Causal links exist between resources and growth of individual organisms and the numbers of organisms in ecosystems during periods of abundant and scarce resources.

Analyzing and Interpreting Data

Cause and Effect