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An ecological pyramid (also trophic pyramid, Eltonian pyramid, energy pyramid, or sometimes food pyramid) is a graphical representation designed to show the biomass or bioproductivity at each trophic level in an ecosystem. A pyramid of energy shows how much energy is retained in the form of new biomass from each trophic level, while a pyramid ...
An understanding of the role of humans as components of the ecosystems and the use of adaptive management is also important. [10] While ecosystem management can be used as part of a plan for wilderness conservation, it can also be used in intensively managed ecosystems (e.g., agroecosystems and close to nature forestry). [10]
A food pyramid and a corresponding food web, demonstrating some of the simpler patterns in a food web A graphic representation of energy transfer between trophic layers in an ecosystem. Energy flow is the flow of energy through living things within an ecosystem. [1]
The systemic origins of ecosystem-based management are rooted in the ecosystem management policy applied to the Great Lakes of North America in the late 1970s. The legislation created, the "Great Lakes Basin and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement of 1978", was based on the claim that "no park is an island", with the purpose to show how strict protection of the area is not the best method ...
The components of food webs, including organisms and mineral nutrients, cross the thresholds of ecosystem boundaries. This has led to the concept or area of study known as cross-boundary subsidy . [ 66 ] [ 67 ] "This leads to anomalies, such as food web calculations determining that an ecosystem can support one half of a top carnivore, without ...
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.
Ecosystem goods include the "tangible, material products" of ecosystem processes such as water, food, fuel, construction material, and medicinal plants. [ 44 ] [ 45 ] They also include less tangible items like tourism and recreation, and genes from wild plants and animals that can be used to improve domestic species.
Trophic cascades are powerful indirect interactions that can control entire ecosystems, occurring when a trophic level in a food web is suppressed. For example, a top-down cascade will occur if predators are effective enough in predation to reduce the abundance, or alter the behavior of their prey, thereby releasing the next lower trophic level from predation (or herbivory if the intermediate ...