ScienceFreePrintable

Exploring Ecosystems Worksheet

A free science worksheet ready for your classroom. Open in Kuraplan to grab the print-ready PDF, customize it for your students, or generate a fresh version in seconds.

Download now

Name:Date:

Exploring Ecosystems Worksheet

Explore how living things interact with each other and their surroundings. Read the field notes, then solve the challenges. Arrows in a food chain show the direction energy moves: from the food to the organism that eats it.

Field notes: a south-east Australian woodland

After a wet spring, a woodland has plenty of grass, wattle shrubs and eucalyptus trees. Grasshoppers eat grass and leaves. Small lizards eat grasshoppers. Wedge-tailed eagles may eat small lizards. Fungi break down dead leaves and other remains, returning nutrients to the soil. Sunlight, water, air and soil are non-living parts of this ecosystem.

1.Which woodland organism is a producer, and what makes it a producer?

2.Choose the best description of a decomposer in this woodland.

An eagle that hunts lizards
A fungus that breaks down dead leaves
A grasshopper that eats plants
A shrub that uses sunlight

3.Sort these ecosystem components into living (biotic) and non-living (abiotic): grasshopper, sunlight, soil, fungi, water, eucalyptus tree.

Follow the energy

Use this food chain for Questions 4–6.

Grass → Grasshopper → Small lizard → Wedge-tailed eagle

4.Identify the producer, primary consumer and secondary consumer in the food chain.

5.In which direction should the arrows point in the food chain, and what do they show?

6.If grass became scarce for a long time, predict one likely effect on grasshoppers and one possible effect on eagles. Explain the links.

7.A food web is usually a better model than one food chain. Explain why, using an example of how an animal may have more than one food source.

Ecosystem change

Imagine a dry summer causes a woodland waterhole to shrink. Plants near the waterhole begin to wilt, and fewer insects are seen there.

8.Name one abiotic change and one biotic change described in the scenario.

9.Why might fewer insects affect animals that eat insects? Give one example of a possible effect.

10.Create a small food web using at least four woodland organisms from the field notes. Draw arrows from each food source to its eater, and include fungi breaking down dead matter.