Unpacked Content
Scientific and Engineering Practices
Analyzing and Interpreting Data
Crosscutting Concepts
Stability and Change
Knowledge
Students know:
- Ecosystems are dynamic in nature and can change over time.
- Disruptions to any physical or biological component of an ecosystem can lead to shifts in all its populations.
- Changes in the physical or biological components of an ecosystem (e.g., rainfall, species introduction) can lead to changes in populations of species.
Skills
Students are able to:
- Demonstrate the scientific idea that changes to physical or biological components of an ecosystem can affect the populations living there.
- Identify and describe the given evidence needed to demonstrate the scientific idea that changes to physical or biological components of an ecosystem can affect the populations living there.
- Evaluate the given evidence, identifying the necessary and sufficient evidence for supporting the scientific idea.
- Use reasoning to connect the evidence and support an explanation using patterns in the evidence to predict the causal relationship between physical and biological components of an ecosystem and changes in organism populations.
Understanding
Students understand that:
- Changes in the amount and availability of given resource may result in changes in the population of an organism.
- Changes in the amount or availability of a resource may result in changes in the growth of individual organisms.
- Resource availability drives competition among organisms, both within a population as well as between populations.
- Resource availability may have an effect on a population's rate of reproduction.
Vocabulary
- Empirical evidence
- Patterns
- Data
- Ecosystem
- Populations
- Physical components (e.g., water, air, temperature, sunlight, soil, etc.)
- Biological components (e.g., plants, animals, etc.)
- Phenomena (e.g., deforestation, succession, drought, fire, disease, human activities, invasive species, etc.)
