Environments Investigation 1 “Terrestrial Environments”
“Two Terrestrial Environments” Reading
1. What are the environmental factors that define a desert?
a. Annual rainfall is less than 25 cm.
b. Soils are rocky and sandy.
c. Deserts are very hot. Winters can be cold, so organisms that live in the desert
must deal with extremes of temperature and very little water.
2. What are the environmental factors that define a tropical rain forest environment?
a. They are very wet all year with annual rainfall from 200 to 450 cm.
b. They are hot all year with very little change in temperature from winter to
summer.
c. The soil is not very fertile.
d. The rain forest has layers with very different amounts of light reaching each layer.
Different organisms live in each layer.
3. Compare the environmental factor of water in deserts and rain forests.
Deserts
Rainforests
Gets less than 25 cm of rain
Gets as much as 450 cm of rain
each year.
each year.
The rain evaporates quickly, so Rainforests have lots of water.
little rain that falls is lost to
plants and animals.
The plants and animals that
survive in the desert have ways
of storing water (cactus) or
conserving water (kangaroo rat.)