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Environmental factors
Environment may be defined as the surrounding of a living organism. With the realization of a direct interference of man with environment and vice versa, environment also encompasses the social and cultural forces of human society. Environmental factors are external forces either living or non-living that affect the life of the organisms. The non-living environment an further be classified into atmosphere, lithosphere and hydrosphere, whereas biotic environment is called biosphere. Environmental factors are substances (soil, rock, water, air), conditions (light, temperature, humidity, rainfall), forces (wind, gravity), and organisms (plants, animals, microorganisms, human being). Broadly the environmental factors are classified as:
1. Climatic factors: These factors denote the long term average weather conditions of a place for examples temperature, precipitation, wind, humidity, fog, cloud cover and atmosphere
gases.
2. Physiographic factors: These include the factors of physical geography of earth such as latitude, longitude, altitude, terrain, angle of slope and aspects.
3. Edaphic factors: These include processes related to the formation of soil and physical, chemical and biological characteristics of soil.
4. Biotic factors: These factors denote all kinds of influences caused by living organisms including man Environmental factors do not act individually, but many factors interact to influence the existence and success of an organism, known as interaction of environmental factors. The intensity, importance and time scale of factors, however, vary with organisms and ecosystem types
Climatic Factors
Climate is a product of weather, which is day-to-day condition of light, temperature, precipitation, humidity, and wind and air pressure. Climatic factors are mainly concerned with aerial environment of organisms. Following are important climatic factors.
Solar radiation
The sun makes all life on earth possible. It provides habitable temperature, otherwise the average temperature of the planet would approach -33O C when all water would be frozen. Sun’s energy is utilized by photosynthetic organisms to convert in food molecules required by almost all forms of life. The amount of solar radiation that reaches a point just outside the earth’s atmosphere (at a height of 83 km) measured perpendicular to the sun’s rays is known as solar constant. Solar constant is estimated as 1.98 langley min-1 or 1.94 cal cm-2 min-1
