Now that we've spent the better part of two lessons studying ecosystem and biome scale processes, I want you to focus especially on soil organisms, soil biodiversity, and the ecology of soils.
For this activity, I want you to complete the paper you have been working on for this lesson (see pages 3 and 4).
For this assignment, you will need to record your work on a word processing document. Your work must be submitted in Word (.doc) or PDF (.pdf) format so I can open it. In addition, documents must be double-spaced and typed in 12 point Times Roman font.
Upload your paper to the "Lesson 11 - Biomes" dropbox in Canvas (in the lesson under the Modules tab) by the due date indicated on our Canvas calendar.
You will be graded on the quality of your writing. You should not simply write responses to the questions and submit them to me. Instead plan on writing a short stand-alone paragraph (or page or whatever you decide is necessary considering any constraints I might have placed on you) so that anyone can read what you've written and understood it. You should strive to be specific and complete in responding to the questions. Your answers should be analytic, thoughtful and insightful, and should provide an insightful connection between ideas. The writing should be tight and crisp with varied sentence structure and a serious, professional tone.
The elite journal Science ran a special section entitled "Soils—The Final Frontier" in June 2004. We will read several articles from the special section in Lesson 12; the following three provide further insight and knowledge on the topic of soil ecology and soil biotic processes.
To learn about the effects of invasive earthworms on soils see Non-native invasive earthworms as agents of change in northern temperate forests [2].