Last revised 5/21/2026

Biothon - Ecology & Conservation

Secondary

Population, community, ecosystem, and evolutionary ecology — through global change and applied conservation, taught for Biothon-level rigor.

Master the foundations of ecology and conservation biology for the Biothon competition. This collection covers population ecology, community ecology, ecosystem ecology, evolutionary ecology, conservation biology, global change ecology, and applied conservation management. Topics include population dynamics and growth models, species interactions and food webs, energy flow and nutrient cycling, natural selection and coevolution, threatened species and habitat fragmentation, climate change impacts, invasive species, and conservation policy frameworks. Designed for advanced high school students with emphasis on quantitative reasoning, real-world case studies, and current scientific frameworks.

Academic primerBiology olympiad prep

Earn3CreditsinBiology

7Modules28Sessions260Cards85Quizzes

Modules in this Collection’s System

Hover a module to read it directly

Population Ecology

Logistic growth, age-structured models, and the population biology that quantifies how populations rise, fall, and stabilize.

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4Sessions

Community Ecology

Resource partitioning, keystone species, ecosystem engineers, and the community-level interactions that organize who lives with whom.

4Sessions

Ecosystem Ecology

Energy flow, biogeochemical cycles, primary productivity, and the ecosystem-scale processes that sustain life.

4Sessions

Evolutionary Ecology

Coevolution, niche construction, rapid contemporary evolution, and the bridge between ecological and evolutionary timescales.

4Sessions

Conservation Biology

Extinction risk, minimum viable population, captive breeding, protected areas, and the conservation biology toolkit.

4Sessions

Global Change Ecology

Climate change ecology, ocean acidification, invasive species, range shifts, and the sixth mass extinction.

4Sessions

Applied Conservation and Management

Applied conservation and management — corridors, payment for ecosystem services, integrated landscape approaches, and adaptive management.

4Sessions

What You'll Walk Away With

1population dynamics toolkit with logistic growth, Lotka-Volterra equations, and Leslie matrix age-structure models
1community ecology framework organizing resource partitioning, keystone species, ecosystem engineers, and trophic cascade dynamics
1biogeochemical cycles map for carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and water — with the human disruptions that destabilize each
1conservation strategy decision tree comparing in-situ protection, ex-situ programs, corridor networks, and the genetic/demographic minimum viable population calculations behind each
1global change ecology briefing on the sixth mass extinction, climate-driven range shifts, ocean acidification, and the metrics conservationists use to track biodiversity loss

You'll Have Answers To

?Why does the logistic growth equation (dN/dt = rN(1−N/K)) capture so much of population biology — and where does it break down?
?Why does the 10% trophic efficiency rule limit food chain length to 4-5 levels in most ecosystems?
?What does coevolution between species, and between species and their environment, imply for predicting ecosystem responses?
?Is the current biodiversity loss really comparable to previous mass extinctions — and what does the rate comparison actually show?
?Which conservation strategy works for which problem — protected areas, corridors, ex-situ programs, payment for ecosystem services?

Critical Concepts Explored

Logistic growth and carrying capacityLotka-Volterra predator-prey dynamicsTrophic cascades and keystone speciesBiogeochemical cycles (C, N, P, water)10% trophic efficiency ruleCoevolution and rapid contemporary evolutionSixth mass extinction and HIPPO driversClimate change and phenological shiftsMinimum viable populationProtected areas, corridors, payment for ecosystem services

Editor's Note

“Ecology and conservation taught with the math and the urgency”

This collection treats ecology the way it should be taught — quantitative population dynamics, rigorous community theory, biogeochemical cycle math, and explicit treatment of the sixth mass extinction. The conservation sections refuse to become advocacy at the cost of rigor; the global change sections refuse to become rigor at the cost of urgency. Genuinely Biothon-grade.

Editor's Brief

Who it's for: Biothon and IBO competitors, AP/IB Biology students working through ecology units, and anyone who wants the conservation conversation grounded in actual ecological mathematics rather than slogans.
What stands out: Population, community, ecosystem, and evolutionary ecology are taught as one continuous discipline — and the conservation applications come from the same quantitative foundation, not as a separate advocacy chapter.
Read if: You want to understand carrying capacity, trophic cascades, biogeochemical cycles, and minimum viable population sizes — not just memorize the names.

Gold Quotes

The logistic growth equation dN/dt = rN(1 − N/K) is one of biology's most elegant compressions — and it generates surprisingly rich behavior including chaos, oscillation, and equilibrium depending on parameters.

r is intrinsic growth rate; K is carrying capacity. The same equation describes Daphnia in lab cultures, human population transitions, and yeast in bioreactors. Modified forms (Allee effects, time delays, stochasticity) produce extinction risks, oscillations, and chaos — and decades of empirical work have validated logistic dynamics across taxa.

The 10% trophic efficiency rule limits food chain length to 4-5 levels in most ecosystems. Most energy is lost as metabolic heat at each level — only a tenth makes it to the next consumer.

Of 10,000 calories of primary production, 1,000 reach herbivores, 100 reach primary carnivores, 10 reach secondary carnivores. Ecosystems with longer food chains (some marine systems) typically have higher transfer efficiencies. This is why apex predators are always rare — and why removing them produces trophic cascades that restructure entire ecosystems.

The current biodiversity loss rate is 100-1000× the background extinction rate measured from the fossil record. Whether to call this the 'sixth mass extinction' is a definitional question; that the rate is unprecedented in human history is settled science.

The five previous mass extinctions (Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, Cretaceous) each removed >75% of species over geological timescales. Current rates extrapolate to similar magnitudes within centuries. The drivers — habitat loss, climate change, invasive species, overexploitation, pollution (acronym HIPPO) — are all human-mediated and in principle reversible. Whether they will be is the policy question.

About the Curator

AAcademic Marathon

Academic Marathon is the editorial voice behind LearningFirst's Physithon and Biothon competition-prep collections — producing rigorous, mathematically grounded primers across the cutting-edge sub-disciplines of physics and biology that competition-track high-school students need to know.