Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A consumer in a food chain is a living creature that eats organisms from a different population. A consumer is a heterotroph and a producer is an autotroph . Like sea angels, they take in organic moles by consuming other organisms, so they are commonly called consumers.
Consumer–resource interactions are the core motif of ecological food chains or food webs, [1] and are an umbrella term for a variety of more specialized types of biological species interactions including prey-predator (see predation), host-parasite (see parasitism), plant-herbivore and victim-exploiter systems. These kinds of interactions ...
Ecosystem services are the various benefits that humans derive from healthy ecosystems. These ecosystems, when functioning well, offer such things as provision of food, natural pollination of crops, clean air and water, decomposition of wastes, or flood control. Ecosystem services are grouped into four broad categories of services.
The framework centers around "consumer-resource models" which largely split a given ecosystem into resources (e.g. sunlight or available water in soil) and consumers (e.g. any living thing, including plants and animals), and attempts to define the scope of possible relationships that could exist between the two groups. [30]
Although definitions of ecosystem management abound, there is a common set of principles which underlie these definitions: A fundamental principle is the long-term sustainability of the production of goods and services by the ecosystem; [52] "intergenerational sustainability [is] a precondition for management, not an afterthought". [43]
In the contemporary world, transnational corporations execute high levels of control over the food system. In this system, both farmers and consumers are disadvantaged and have little control; power is concentrated in the center of the supply chain, where corporations control how food moves from producers to consumers. [29]
Ecosystem services are ecologically mediated functional processes essential to sustaining healthy human societies. [6] Water provision and filtration, production of biomass in forestry, agriculture, and fisheries, and removal of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO 2) from the atmosphere are examples of ecosystem services essential to public health and economic opportunity.
Ecological goods and services (EG&S) are the economical benefits (goods and services) arising from the ecological functions of ecosystems. Such benefits accrue to all living organisms, including animals and plants, rather than to humans alone. However, there is a growing recognition of the importance to society that ecological goods and ...