The webpage http://www.mhhe.com/biosci/genbio/virtual_labs/BL_02/BL_02.html offers an opportunity to model different ecosystems.
The site includes five different ecosystems (an ecosystem consists of communities of living organisms interacting with each other and the environment), a deciduous forest, a hot desert, a grassland, an Antarctic ocean shore and a fresh water lake.
For each ecosystem there is a set of organisms which one has to classify according to their trophic level- that is the position that the organism takes in the food chain. The site allows you to check whether you have done so correctly, once you have, it also allows you to see the correspondent biomass and amount of energy there is per trophic level.
The site includes five different ecosystems (an ecosystem consists of communities of living organisms interacting with each other and the environment), a deciduous forest, a hot desert, a grassland, an Antarctic ocean shore and a fresh water lake.
For each ecosystem there is a set of organisms which one has to classify according to their trophic level- that is the position that the organism takes in the food chain. The site allows you to check whether you have done so correctly, once you have, it also allows you to see the correspondent biomass and amount of energy there is per trophic level.
We can see a general trend that as we move up the trophic levels from producers to tertiary consumers the number of organisms and energy decreases