Integrative Biology 102: Lecture Outline
Productivity

Lecture Objectives

By the end of the lecture and after reading the text assignment, you should be able to:

1. list environmental factors that affect the rate of photosynthesis.
2. use your diagrams of a leaf and cell to explain how and where these environmental factors affect the rate of photosynthesis in a plant:

• water
• carbon dioxide
• light
• nutrients
• temperature

3. explain how the factors listed in Obj. 2:

• affect biome productivity
• affect the production of plant crops.

4. predict the relative productivity of biomes.
5. explain why C4 plants like corn have a higher yield than C3 plants.
6. describe the ways humans have appropriated ecosystem NPP.
7. list the largest threats to continued increasing crop productivity.
   

Reading:  Ch. 4.3 and 5.4

Movie
The Changing Environment:  A look at the Aral Sea over time--You will have to look for it in the menu at the right side.

Sites:
Globio:  mapping human impact on the biosphere

2. Biome productivity and limiting environmental factors

3. Agricultural yields

• depend on
  

• photorespiration:  a solution by some grasses
  

4.  Human appropriation of NPP

For the next lecture on Releasing Energy: Respiration there is no additional reading, but be able to answer the following questions:

• If our cells had the same anaerobic pathways as plants, what would happen when we exercised aerobically?
• Why do compost piles heat up?