Eco Column Lab Report

This lab is an opportunity to observe, study, and learn about ecosystems and how the environment sustains life but in a much simpler and smaller scale which is called Eco Columns. The environmental conditions in the Eco Column could sustain life for several weeks, therefore over the course of the several weeks we will observe and study the interconnections between each ecosystems. A self sustaining requires components such as energy flow and chemical cycle. This experiment will evaluate our knowledge on the phosphorus, carbon, nitrogen, and water cycle. For example; the water cycle is needed to stabilize the water needs of each organism in the ecosystem; the carbon cycle makes up the living tissues, absorbed by plants through photosynthesis and released during decomposition and organisms breathing; the nitrogen cycle uses bacteria to continue the process of nitrification, roots absorb it, and organisms use it in the form of NO3; the phosphorus cycle are found in rocks which bring nutrients to the soil. In this experiment our goal is to make our eco column the most efficient and make it the ideal environmental conditions for the organism to survive using data, for example we know what levels of nitrite is too high therefore we are going to change the water if the levels of nitrite is too high.
The aquatic layer circulates the carbon, the terrestrial where plants produced oxygen, and the decomposition which produced carbon dioxide and circulated the carbon. In the eco column the materials we used were soil, gold fishes, a snail, aquatic plants, moss, tropical plant, compost, tape, liter bottles, worms, gravel, and etc. Both the terrestrial and aquatic consists of abiotic factors and biotic