Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Ecosystem classifications are specific kinds of ecological classifications that consider all four elements of the definition of ecosystems: a biotic component, an abiotic complex, the interactions between and within them, and the physical space they occupy. Biotic factors of the ecosystem are living things; such as plants, animals, and bacteria ...
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.
Eugene Odum, one of the founders of the science of ecology, stated: "Any unit that includes all of the organisms (i.e.: the "community") in a given area interacting with the physical environment so that a flow of energy leads to clearly defined trophic structure, biotic diversity, and material cycles (i.e.: exchange of materials between living ...
The biotic environment includes genes, cells, organisms, members of the same species (conspecifics) and other species that share a habitat. [172] The distinction between external and internal environments, however, is an abstraction parsing life and environment into units or facts that are inseparable in reality.
This stream operating together with its environment can be thought of as forming a river ecosystem. River ecosystems are flowing waters that drain the landscape, and include the biotic (living) interactions amongst plants, animals and micro-organisms, as well as abiotic (nonliving) physical and chemical interactions of its many parts.
These differences in abiotic components alter the species present by creating boundaries of what species can survive within the environment and influencing competition between two species. Abiotic factors such as salinity can give one species a competitive advantage over another, creating pressures that lead to speciation and alteration of a ...
Ecosystem diversity addresses the combined characteristics of biotic properties which are living organisms (biodiversity) and abiotic properties such as nonliving things like water or soil (geodiversity). It is a variation in the ecosystems found in a region or the variation in ecosystems over the whole planet.
environment The biotic and abiotic surroundings of an organism or population, and the chemical interactions between these factors that influence their survival, development, and evolution. An environment can vary in scale from microscopic to global. environmental degradation environmental science environmental restoration