Before you start
Ecosystems are by their nature complex environments, with a myriad of abiotic and biotic factors interacting and influencing each other. Changes take place both temporarily and spatially; temporal changes over seasons and spatial changes in contrasting locations, whether in areas of contrasting woodland management or in grasslands with varying levels of trampling.
Questions that look at temporal change can be interesting – especially if you are able to survey multiple times in different seasons – but in practical terms are often less useful for GCSE geography enquiries. Ecosystem studies that focus on a changing abiotic or biotic factor or a contrasting location are easier to manage and ensure some stretch for able students.
- How and why does woodland management effect plant species richness and diversity?
- How does changing canopy cover in a woodland effect vegetation cover?
- How do soil conditions affect plant richness and diversity?
- How does trampling affect the plant communities at X?
Questions focusing on contrasting locations in different microhabitats or areas under different conditions within an ecosystem lend themselves well to a hypothesis testing approach, allowing students to test multiple factors and collect representative sets of data with repeated measurements.