Intersections between AP Biology and AP Environmental Science

I took AP Biology as a course and APES self-taught myself out of a textbook. Therefore, I noticed something about second-time around students that they may have missed – that a large portion of what I was supposed to be learning in APES, I had actually already learned in Bio. More specifically, AP Bio Units 7 & 8 (Natural Selection/ Ecology) are a huge part of APES.

The first unit is Unit 8 – Ecology. This unit discusses the flow of energy in trophic levels, which includes the approximately ten percent of energy transfer between trophic levels. This unit also talks about the biogeochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. This is exactly what APES Unit 1 talks about. The only difference is that it asks you to apply what you know to understand what happens in nature with human intervention. For example, what will happen to a lake if there is too much nitrogen due to fertilizer. It hits population ecology again as well. The concepts of carrying capacity, exponential vs. logistic growth, and r-selected/K-selected species are taught in Bio Unit 8. It is basically all of APES Unit 3. I had already seen all of those graphs and the two reproductive strategies in Bio, so it didn’t seem as though I was learning something new in APES about how populations and their food supply function.

Community ecology overlaps as well. Competition, predation, and the various symbiosis relationships taught in Bio and APES are exactly the same. APES goes beyond that by applying it to specific examples, such as keystone and invasive species, and showing what will happen to an ecosystem if certain components of it are removed or introduced.

Unit 7 in Bio, Natural Selection, isn’t very apparent in the APES course, but much of APES Unit 2, biodiversity, relies on it. Biodiversity is created due to natural selection and adaptation in populations, and it is through the genetic diversity of these organisms that they can survive through diseases and environmental changes. This is why APES classifies low biodiversity as a danger.