Biomes Basics
What is a biome?
A large area with similar plants, animals, and climate.
What is food security?
The United Nations defines food security as all people at all times: Have access to sufficient food; to meet dietary needs and food preferences; for an active or healthy life.
Crop yield refers to the total amount of crop produced per unit of land, such as tonnes per hectare. True or False?
True. Crop yield measures how much crop is produced from a certain area of land, which helps farmers and researchers evaluate the productivity of agricultural systems.
Biodiversity represents the total variety of all living things on Earth. This includes ecosystem diversity, species diversity and genetic diversity. It helps an environment be resilient and cope with change.
Cutting down trees is called what?
Deforestation.
Which two things mainly decide a biome?
Temperature and rainfall.
What is Australia’s largest biome?
Desert.
What is irrigation and why is it used?
Artificially supplying water to crops—to overcome rainfall variability and boost yields.
What is the aim of the Great Green Wall Initiative?
To plant an 8000km long wall of trees across the width of Africa from Senegal to Djibouti. The goal of the Great Green Wall is to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land by 2030.
How might climate change affect Australian farming?
More droughts and heat waves make it harder to grow crops.
Why does a rainforest have more species than a desert?
More rain and stable warm climate give better growing conditions.
How can biomes impact food security? Include one example.
Biomes affect food security because their climate, soil quality, and rainfall determine what crops can be grown and how reliable food production is. For example, in the desert biome, low rainfall and poor soils make farming difficult, which can lead to food shortages.
Does Australia or Chad produce more food? Give three reasons why.
Australia produces more food because
1. It has large areas of fertile farmland, advanced farming technology, reliable infrastructure, and strong government support for agriculture.
2. Chad produces much less food because of its hot, dry climate, frequent droughts, limited technology, and reliance on subsistence farming, which makes food production less reliable.
Mali, Niger, Chad, Nigeria, Mauritania, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Sudan Eritrea
Identify two advantages and two disadvantages of Biofuels.
Advantages: renewable energy source, lower greenhouse gas emissions, reduce reliance on coal, produced locally, made from waste products, can be used in existing vehicles
Disadvantages: competes with food production, can cause deforestation, requires lots of water
Which biome usually lies between deserts and forests?
Grasslands.
Name the four pillars of food security.
Access - relates to having access to somewhere to grow or buy food.
Availability - relates to having a diverse food supply and trade. Availability requires careful resource management and sustainable farming practices.
Utilisation - relates to how our bodies use the nutrients in our food. Utilisation is about providing and preparing diverse foods with high nutrients so that people are healthy.
Stability - consistent supply of healthly food. Issues like drought, conflict and economic crisis reduce the stability of growing and supplying people with enough food.
The absence of one or all these factors leads to food insecurity. Food insecurity when there is not enough food to meet the demand to feed the population.
Why do farmers use fertilisers, and what is one problem if too much is used?
Helps plants grow, but too much can pollute rivers and soil.
How is the palm oil industry creating a monoculture, and why is this a problem.
a monoculture is when there is only one or a dominant species present in the ecosystem. Palm oil plantations create monocultures because they replace the forest with only one type of plant, oil palm. Monocultures are incredibly weak ecosystems and are not resilient to change.
What happens to biodiversity when forests are cleared?
Animals lose homes, species numbers drop.
Explain one way latitude influences biome distribution.
Distance from the equator affects sun radiation and climate, producing predictable bands of biomes.
Which two pillars negatively impact food security in Australia.
The stability of our food supply is often impacted by drought and other natural hazards, particularly cyclones and bushfires. For example, 100,000 livestock were lost during the 2019-2020 bushfire crisis.
Australia's food insecurity is largely due to access. A lack of access to food is also related to economic factors and the spatial distribution of people and towns/cities. Remote communities in Australia often have only one general store to purchase food and it is often more expensive. This is due to the time and cost of transporting food. For example, food in general stores in remote communities are on average 26% more expensive than grocery stores in Darwin.
Explain how the Netherlands uses vertical farming to increase their food security (must refer to the four pillars of food security).
The Netherlands are high in access and availability because they produce so much food and their country is not large so they can move it faster. The Netherlands are also high in utilisation because they produce a variety of nutritious foods and they are high in stability because their food is in constant supply thanks to the vertical farms. Their greenhouse vertical farms are not limited by the seasons.
Explain three issues people living in the Sahel Region face.
1. Food insecurity - Landscape is dry and arid, making it hard to grow crops
2. Many countries in the region lose hectares of land to desertification each year, due to climate change and human activity
3. The lack of available land for agriculture creates poverty and forces people to migrate
Explain three ways human impact threatens biodiversity.
1. Habitat loss - eg. clearing of land for urbanisation
2. Pollution eg. plastic in ocean, air pollution
3. Overexploitation of resources eg overfishing
4. Introduction of invasive species eg. cane toads
5. Climate change eg. warmer ocean temps = coral bleaching