Biology- Block C
April 17, 2013
WRITING FOR SCIENCE
Essay: Identify a biome in which the plants are short and require little water and the animals are small. Then, write a one page description of this biome. A biome is a large ecosystem where plants, animals, insects, and people live in a certain type of climate. Therefore, desert where the plants are short and the animals are small because of a lack of water. There is one-fifth of the earth land’s surface is desert. Deserts can be found on every continent except Europe. The desert biome can be separated into four kinds and they are cold, hot and dry, coastal and semiarid. The cold deserts that are located in Greenland, Antarctic and the Nearctic ecozone. These deserts are characterized by cold winters with snowfall and high overall temperatures throughout the winter, and sometimes in the summer too. In the hot and dry desert, the seasons are generally warm throughout the year and very hot in the summer. But the winters usually bring little rainfall. With the summers are moderately long and dry and the winters are normally have a low concentration of rainfall, which are made up the semiarid desert And the final desert is occurred in moderately cool to warm areas such as the Nearctic and Neotropical realm.
Deserts are also found in areas where rainfall is less than 50 cm a year. However, with a little rainfall, most of the deserts have a considerable amount of specialized vegetation and vertebrate and invertebrate animals as well. And there are only a few large mammals in the deserts because they are not capable of storing sufficient water or withstanding the blistering heat. In the variety of the deserts, plants have had to develop different ways of capturing water in the roots, stems, leaves or fruit in order to survive in their habitat. There are short grasses, sagebrush, creosote bushes and cacti can be found in nearly all deserts. About animals, in order to survive, they try to stay in