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The organisms responsible for primary production are called primary producers or autotrophs. Most marine primary production is generated by a diverse collection of marine microorganisms called algae and cyanobacteria. Together these form the principal primary producers at the base of the ocean food chain and produce half of the world's oxygen ...
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.
Gross primary production (GPP) is the amount of chemical energy, typically expressed as carbon biomass, that primary producers create in a given length of time. Some fraction of this fixed energy is used by primary producers for cellular respiration and maintenance of existing tissues (i.e., "growth respiration" and " maintenance respiration ").
Primary production is the synthesis of organic material from inorganic molecules. Primary production in most ecosystems is dominated by the process of photosynthesis, In which organisms synthesize organic molecules from sunlight, H 2 O, and CO 2. [3]
As primary consumers, zooplankton are the crucial link between the primary producers (mainly phytoplankton) and the rest of the marine food web (secondary consumers); [191] the ocean's primary producers are mostly tiny phytoplankton which have r-strategist traits of growing and reproducing rapidly, so a small mass can have a fast rate of ...
As with the others, this graph shows producers at the bottom and higher trophic levels on top. When an ecosystem is healthy, this graph produces a standard ecological pyramid. This is because, in order for the ecosystem to sustain itself, there must be more energy at lower trophic levels than there is at higher trophic levels.
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]
One example of primary succession takes place after a volcano has erupted. The lava flows into the ocean and hardens into new land. The resulting barren land is first colonized by pioneer organisms, like algae, which pave the way for later, less hardy plants, such as hardwood trees, by facilitating pedogenesis, especially through the biotic acceleration of weathering and the addition of ...