In any habitat, living organisms experience the cumulative effect of various conditions. Abiotic factors, biotic factors and anthropogenic affect the characteristics of their life 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 a cumulative effect on living organisms.
All conditions of inanimate nature are called abiotic factors. This is, for example, the amount of solar radiation or moisture. Biotic factors include all types of interaction between living organisms. In recent years, human activity has an increasing influence on living organisms. This factor is anthropogenic.
Abiotic environmental factors
The action of inanimate nature factors depends on the climatic conditions of the habitat. One of them is sunlight. The intensity of photosynthesis, and hence the saturation of air with oxygen, depends on its quantity. It is this substance that living organisms need for respiration.
Abiotic factors also include temperature and air humidity. The species diversity and the growing season of plants, the features of the life cycle of animals depend on them. Living organisms adapt to these factors in different ways. For example, most angiosperms shed their leaves for the winter to avoid excessive moisture loss. Desert plants have a tap root system that reaches considerable depths. This provides them with the necessary amount of moisture. Primroses have time to grow and bloom in a few spring weeks. And the period of dry summer and cold winter with little snow they experience underground in the form of an onion. Enough water and nutrients accumulate in this underground modification of the shoot.
Abiotic environmental factors also involve the influence of local factors on living organisms. These include the nature of the relief, the chemical composition and saturation of soils with humus, the level of salinity of the water, the nature of ocean currents, the direction and speed of the wind, and 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 a different nature of impact on living organisms. Monodominant is the impact of one predominant influence with a slight manifestation of the rest. For example, if there is not enough nitrogen in the soil, the root system develops at an insufficient level and other elements cannot influence its development.
Strengthening the action of several factors at the same time is a manifestation of synergy. So, if there is enough moisture in the soil, plants begin to absorb both nitrogen and solar radiation better. Abiotic factors, biotic factors and anthropogenic factors can be provocative. With an early thaw, the plants will most likely 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 appear quite polar. In certain cases organisms have no effect. This is a typical manifestation of neutralism. This rare phenomenon is considered only in the absence of direct interaction of organisms with each other. Living in a common biogeocenosis, squirrels and moose do not interact in any way. However, they are affected by the overall quantitative ratio in the biological system.
Examples of biotic factors
Commensalism is also a biotic factor. For example,when deer spread burdock fruits, they receive neither benefit nor harm from it. At the same time, they bring significant benefits, settling many types of plants.
Between organisms often there are mutually beneficial relationships. Mutualism and symbiosis are examples of these. 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 anemone. Its predatory flower is a reliable defense of the arthropod. And the sea anemone shell is used as a dwelling.
A closer mutually beneficial cohabitation is symbiosis. Its classic example is lichens. This group of organisms is a collection of fungal filaments and blue-green algae cells.
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 are looking for organisms of certain species.
The action of anthropogenic factors
Abiotic factors, biotic factors have long been the only ones affecting living organisms. However, with the development of human society, its influence on nature increased more and more. The famous scientist V. I. Vernadsky even singled out a separate shell created by human activity, which he called the Noosphere. Deforestation, unlimited plowing of land, the extermination of many species of plants and animals, unreasonablenature management are the main factors that change the environment.
Habitat and its factors
Biotic factors, examples of which have been given, along with other groups and forms of influences, have their own significance in different habitats. Ground-air vital activity of organisms largely depends on fluctuations in air temperature. And in water, the same indicator is not so important. The action of the anthropogenic factor at the moment is of particular importance 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 salinity level 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 its salinity. As a result, plant and animal organisms that cannot adapt to changes in this factor and adapt inevitably die. At the moment, this is a global environmental problem of mankind.
The limiting factor in the aquatic environment is also the amount of carbon dioxide and sunlight, which reduce plant species diversity with depth. Predatory andparasitic organisms, competition for food and a partner of the opposite sex, the spread of viruses that cause epidemics of various diseases in humans and animals, also greatly change the conditions and limit the number of species of organisms.
So, abiotic factors, biotic factors and anthropogenic factors together act on different groups of living organisms in habitats, regulating their numbers and life processes, changing the species richness of the planet.
