Abiotic factors, biotic environmental factors: examples

In any habitat, living organisms experience the cumulative effect of various conditions. Abiotic factors, biotic factors and anthropogenic factors affect the characteristics of their life activity and adaptation.

What are environmental factors?

Living organisms inhabit several habitats. These include water, land-air and soil. Some species live in other organisms. They are called parasitic. Each of them is characterized by certain properties. They are called environmental factors. These properties can be grouped into three groups. These are abiotic factors, biotic and anthropogenic. They have an aggregate effect on living organisms.

All conditions of inanimate nature are called abiotic factors. This, for example, is the amount of solar radiation or moisture. Biotic factors include all types of interaction of living organisms among themselves. Recently, human activity has an increasing influence on living organisms. This factor is anthropogenic.

Abiotic environmental factors

The action of factors of inanimate nature depends on the climatic conditions of the habitat. One of them is sunlight. The intensity of photosynthesis depends on its quantity, and hence the saturation of the air with oxygen. It is this substance that is necessary for living organisms to breathe.

The abiotic factors also include the temperature regime and the humidity of the air. The species diversity and vegetation period of plants depend on them, and the life cycle of animals. Living organisms in different ways adapt to these factors. For example, most angiosperms discard leaves for the winter to avoid excessive moisture loss. Plants of deserts have a core root system, which reaches considerable depths. This provides them with the necessary amount of moisture. Primroses have time to grow and flower in several spring weeks. And the period of arid summer and cold little snowy winter, they experience under the ground in the form of a bulb. In this underground modification of the shoot, a sufficient amount of water and nutrients accumulates.

Abiotic environmental factors also assume the influence of local factors on living organisms. These include the nature of the relief, the chemical composition and saturation of humus soils, the level of water salinity, the nature of ocean currents, the direction and speed of the wind, the direction of radiation. Their influence manifests itself both directly and indirectly. Thus, the nature of the relief determines the effect of winds, moisture and light.

Influence of abiotic factors

Factors of inanimate nature have different character of impact on living organisms. Monodominant is the influence of one predominant influence with a slight manifestation of the others. For example, if there is not enough nitrogen in the soil, the root system develops at an insufficient level and other elements can not influence its development.

Strengthening the effect of several factors simultaneously is a manifestation of synergism. So, if there is enough moisture in the soil, plants are better able to absorb both nitrogen and solar radiation. Abiotic factors, biotic factors and anropogenic can also be provocative. At an early onset of a thaw, plants are likely to suffer from frost.

Features of the action of biotic factors

Biotic factors include various forms of influence of living organisms on each other. They can also be direct and indirect and manifest fairly polar. In certain cases, organisms have no effect. This is a typical manifestation of neutralism. This rare phenomenon is considered only in the case of complete absence of direct effects of organisms on each other. Inhabited in a general biogeocenosis, the squirrels and moose do not interact in any way. However, they have a common quantitative ratio in the biological system.

Examples of biotic factors

Biotic factor is also kommentsalizm. For example, when deer carry the burdock, they do not benefit from it, nor do harm. In doing so, they bring significant benefits, settling many types of plants.

Between the organisms there are often mutually beneficial relationships. Their examples are mutualism and symbiosis. In the first case, there is a mutually beneficial cohabitation of organisms of different species. A typical example of mutualism is the hermit crab and the sea anemone. Her predatory flower is a reliable protection of the arthropod. A conch of actinia uses as a home.

Closer mutually beneficial cohabitation is symbiosis. Its classic example are lichens. This group of organisms is a collection of threads of fungi and cells of blue-green algae.

Biotic factors, examples of which we have considered, can be supplemented with predation. In this type of interaction, organisms of one species are food for others. In one case, predators attack, kill and eat their prey. In the other, they search for organisms of certain species.

Effects of anthropogenic factors

Abiotic factors, biotic factors for a long time were the only ones that affect living organisms. However, with the development of human society, its influence on nature grew more and more. The well-known scientist VI Vernadsky even singled out a separate shell created by the activity of a man, which he called Noosphere. Deforestation, unrestricted plowing of lands, extermination of many species of plants and animals, unreasonable use of nature are the main factors that change the environment.

Habitat and its factors

Biotic factors, examples of which have been shown, along with other groups and forms of influence, in different habitats have their significance. The terrestrial aerial activity of organisms depends to a large extent on the variation of air temperature. And in water this indicator is not so important. The effect of the anthropogenic factor at the moment acquires special significance in all habitats of other living organisms.

Limiting factors and adaptation of organisms

A separate group can be identified factors that limit the vital activity of organisms. They are called limiting or limiting. For deciduous plants, abiotic factors include the amount of solar radiation and moisture. They are limiting. In the aquatic environment, its level of salinity and chemical composition are limiting. So global warming leads to the melting of glaciers. In turn, this entails an increase in the content of fresh water and a decrease in the level of its salinity. As a result, plant and animal organisms that can not adapt to the change of this factor and adapt, inevitably perish. At the moment, this is a global environmental problem for mankind.

The limiting factor in the aquatic environment is also the amount of carbon dioxide and sunlight, which reduce the species diversity of plants with depth. Predatory and parasitic organisms, competition for food and partners of the opposite sex, the spread of viruses that causes epidemics of various human and animal diseases, also significantly change the conditions and limit the number of species of organisms.

So, abiotic factors, biotic factors and anthropogenic factors in aggregate act on different groups of living organisms in their habitats, regulating their numbers and processes of life, changing the species richness of the planet.