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Community Nonliving Components

An ecosystem is a community of living and non-living components that interact as a system. Ecosystems are controlled by both external factors like climate and topography which influence their overall structure, as well as internal factors like nutrient cycles, energy flows, and the network of interactions between organisms and their environment. Ecosystems are dynamic entities that are subject to periodic disturbances and recovery, and provide goods and services that people depend on, suggesting natural resource management should focus on the ecosystem level rather than individual species.

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25 views

Community Nonliving Components

An ecosystem is a community of living and non-living components that interact as a system. Ecosystems are controlled by both external factors like climate and topography which influence their overall structure, as well as internal factors like nutrient cycles, energy flows, and the network of interactions between organisms and their environment. Ecosystems are dynamic entities that are subject to periodic disturbances and recovery, and provide goods and services that people depend on, suggesting natural resource management should focus on the ecosystem level rather than individual species.

Uploaded by

Juanita
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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An ecosystem is a community of living organisms (plants, animals

and microbes) in conjunction with the nonliving components of their


environment (things like air, water and mineral soil), interacting as a
system. These biotic and abiotic components are regarded as linked
together through nutrient cycles and energy flows. As ecosystems
are defined by the network of interactions among organisms, and
between organisms and their environment, they can come in any
size
Ecosystems are controlled both by external and internal factors.
External factors such as climate, the parent material which forms the
soil and topography, control the overall structure of an ecosystem
and the way things work within it, but are not themselves influenced
by the ecosystem. Other external factors include time and potential
biota. Ecosystems are dynamic entitiesinvariably, they are subject
to periodic disturbances and are in the process of recovering from
some past disturbance. Ecosystems in similar environments that are
located in different parts of the world can end up doing things very
differently simply because they have different pools of species
present. Biodiversity affects ecosystem function, as do the
processes of disturbance and succession. Ecosystems provide a
variety of goods and services upon which people depend; the
principles of ecosystem management suggest that rather than
managing individual species, natural resources should be managed
at the level of the ecosystem itself. Classifying ecosystems into
ecologically homogeneous units is an important step towards
effective ecosystem management, but there is no single, agreedupon way to do this.

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