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Freshwater ecosystem. Freshwater ecosystems are a subset of Earth's aquatic ecosystems that include the biological communities inhabiting freshwater waterbodies such as lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, springs, bogs, and wetlands. [1] They can be contrasted with marine ecosystems, which have a much higher salinity. Freshwater habitats can be ...
Freshwater ecosystem Freshwater ecosystems are a subset of Earth's aquatic ecosystems that include the biological communities inhabiting freshwater waterbodies such as lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, springs, bogs, and wetlands. [8] They can be contrasted with marine ecosystems, which have a much higher salinity. Freshwater habitats can be ...
Freshwater ecosystems are a subset of Earth's aquatic ecosystems that include the biological communities inhabiting freshwater waterbodies such as lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, springs, bogs, and wetlands. [16]
The Earth's land surface is divided into eight terrestrial biogeographic realms or ecozones, which contain hundreds of smaller ecoregions. Ecoregions are classified into biomes or major habitat types, which have similar climates and vegetation types. The freshwater system is similar, with ecoregions classified into freshwater realms and biomes.
Physical properties of aquatic ecosystems are determined by a combination of heat, currents, waves and other seasonal distributions of environmental conditions. [13] The morphometry of a body of water depends on the type of feature (such as a lake, river, stream, wetland, estuary etc.) and the structure of the earth surrounding the body of water.
Most water in Earth's atmosphere and crust comes from saline seawater, while fresh water accounts for nearly 1% of the total. The vast bulk of the water on Earth is saline or salt water, with an average salinity of 35‰ (or 3.5%, roughly equivalent to 34 grams of salts in 1 kg of seawater), though this varies slightly according to the amount of runoff received from surrounding land.
The Global 200, a set of ecoregions identified by WWF whose conservation would achieve the goal of saving a broad diversity of the Earth's ecosystems, includes a number of areas highlighted for their freshwater biodiversity values. The Global 200 preceded Freshwater Ecoregions of the World and incorporated information from regional freshwater ...
Freshwater biology is also used to study the effects of climate change and increased human impact on both aquatic systems and wider ecosystems. [4] Freshwater organisms, vertebrates especially, appear to be at a higher extinction risk from climate change than terrestrial or marine organisms.