Ecologists have a number of ways of measuring and representing ecosystems. You will see a few of those in Biology 20. Conveniently, many of them end up showing an ecosystem in the form of a pyramid. What are each of these pyramids and what are they showing about the ecosystem?
By Thompsma (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons EnergyAn energy pyramid shows the available energy at each tropic level. Notice that although some of the pyramids of numbers and biomass are inverted (have a small base), the pyramid of energy can never be inverted. This is due to the first law of thermodynamics and the rule of 10.
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