Aquatic biomes

A large region with similar conditions and communities is called a biome. The last major kind of biome is the aquatic biome. This includes all freshwater lakes, ponds, streams and rivers, along with the world’s saltwater oceans.

In all, water covers around 75 percent of the earth’s surface and is home to an extraordinary diversity of life. The limiting factors in aquatic biomes are different in several important ways. Recall that temperature is a limiting factor on land, but water has many fewer temperature fluctuations.

In aquatic environments, the water provides the added benefit of more buoyancy for organisms as support against gravity. The amount of light available in aquatic biomes is a limiting factor in ways that are not experienced on land.

The plants and animals living in freshwater biomes are adapted to the low salt concentrations characteristic of these environment.

Freshwater biomes vary in spatial scale from just a few square meters to thousands of square kilometers. They are found in every continent, have varied origins and have diverse combinations of biotic and abiotic factors.
Aquatic biomes