Mass and energy flow in the taiga

Particularly, the taiga is my favorite biome because of its weather, trees and fauna. It's also the world's largest biome and it's the one I researched about in my first semester of environmental systems and societies. As my team did a LARGE poster about the taiga, I can clearly describe an example of biomass and energy flow that occurs in this biome.

As we all know, these flows are related to the trophic levels. It all starts with grass (in this case) creating biomass as it obtains energy from the sun and changes chemical energy into an organic source of energy that can be transferred. The whole amount of energy produced by the grass in the ecosystem is known as gross primary productivity. However, plants required some of that energy to grow and carry out respiration processes, so the amount of energy that they pass to the next level, known as net primary productivity, is lower.

Then, let's imagine that white-tailed deer eat this grass. All the amount of energy they get from the grass they eat is called gross secondary productivity. However, as these deer have much more processes and activity than grass, they're going to require lots of energy from what they ate, so the amount of energy they pass to the next level, net secondary productivity, is much lower.

When a wolf, which is a second level consumer, eats the white-tailed deer, they're going to receive very low amounts from the original energy, so they will have the need to eat in more quantities to receive enough energy.

This is a single food chain, but this happens in every food chain in the taiga and all other ecosystems. The concept's known as entropy.