Biology assignment
Introduction
Hastings point is located in NSW just below the borderline of Queensland. The human population of Hastings point is 582. The areas of general study are the rocky shore ecosystem and the sand dune ecosystem. The sand dunes (continue). The sand dune ecosystem shows evidence of mainly succession; the other rocky shore ecosystem shows evidence of zonation. The sand dune shows this evidence by having several different areas and that even at 100m away from the beach there is still sand; showing that the sand dunes have been pushed back by the wind over many years. Also the spinifex that grows in the flotsam zone builds up new sand to make a new dune.
Zonation/succession in sand dunes
Zonation is defined as the categorization…show more content… We noted each plant that we came across and drew a profile diagram of where each of the different types of plants were located and how tall they were and what they did to help the dune ecosystem. This data supported the fact that the dune ecosystem has succession by showing that there are several different zones and they all have some sand in them, therefore these zones were once the very start of a new flotsam zone but over many years more and more new flotsam zones were accumulated and this lead to the previous zones being ‘pushed back’ so to speak. Succession affects the distribution of not organisms but mainly plants. There were no organisms that we could see because the sand dunes don’t house many organism other than plants. The distribution of plants though was like this. In the first 10-20m (the flotsam zone) there was mainly spinifex, but there was some Goats foot vine and dune sesuva. In the next 20-30m (The 1st swale and foredune) there was yellow beach rum, Goats foot vine, spinifex and NZ sea lettuce. The next 30-40 (2nd swale), there was Spinifex, Goats foot vine, olive dune grass and smooth leaf banksia. In the next 40-50m (2nd