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The management of forests is known as forestry, silviculture, and forest management. A forest ecosystem is a natural woodland unit consisting of all plants, animals, and micro-organisms (biotic components) in that area functioning together with all of the non-living physical factors of the environment. [2]
A food web is the natural interconnection of food chains and a graphical representation of what-eats-what in an ecological community. Position in the food web, or trophic level, is used in ecology to broadly classify organisms as autotrophs or heterotrophs.
The rainforest in Amazon, in the Marquesas Islands, is an example of an undisturbed natural resource. Forest provides timber for humans, food, water and shelter for the flora and fauna tribes and animals. The nutrient cycle between organisms forms food chains and fosters a biodiversity of species.
This includes its role in providing ecosystem services - the benefits that humans get from ecosystems. Biodiversity plays a major role in the productivity and functioning of ecosystems, affects their ability to provide ecosystem services. [2] For example, biodiversity is a source of food, medication, and materials used in industry. Recreation ...
An example of an ecosystem service is pollination, here by a honey bee on avocado crop. 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 ...
Rainforests are disappearing across the world, and at an alarming rate in Brazil. Since the 1980s, more than 153,000 square miles of Amazonian rainforest has fallen victim to deforestation. [6] Brazil has helped feed the growing global demand for food supply of soybeans and beef with the newly cleared land. [6]
The human population exploits and depends on many animal and plant species for food, mainly through agriculture, but also by exploiting wild populations, notably of marine fish. [10] [11] [12] Livestock animals are raised for meat across the world; they include (2011) around 1.4 billion cattle, 1.2 billion sheep and 1 billion domestic pigs. [12 ...
Although about 80 percent of humans' food supply comes from just 20 kinds of plants, [159] humans use at least 40,000 species. [160] Earth's surviving biodiversity provides resources for increasing the range of food and other products suitable for human use, although the present extinction rate shrinks that potential. [125]