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Abiotic components include physical conditions and non-living resources that affect living organisms in terms of growth, maintenance, and reproduction. Resources are distinguished as substances or objects in the environment required by one organism and consumed or otherwise made unavailable for use by other organisms.
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.
From one year to another, ecosystems experience variation in their biotic and abiotic environments. A drought, a colder than usual winter, and a pest outbreak all are short-term variability in environmental conditions. Animal populations vary from year to year, building up during resource-rich periods and crashing as they overshoot their food ...
Biotic stresses have had huge repercussions for humanity; an example of this is the potato blight, an oomycete which caused widespread famine in England, Ireland and Belgium in the 1840s. [6] Another example is grape phylloxera coming from North America in the 19th century, which led to the Great French Wine Blight. [6]
Abiotic stress mostly affects plants used in agriculture. Some examples of adverse conditions (which may be caused by climate change) are high or low temperatures, drought, salinity, and toxins. [20] Rice (Oryza sativa) is a classic example. Rice is a staple food throughout the world, especially in China and India.
Temperature is an important abiotic factor in lentic ecosystems because most of the biota are poikilothermic, where internal body temperatures are defined by the surrounding system. Water can be heated or cooled through radiation at the surface and conduction to or from the air and surrounding substrate. [ 6 ]
Although environmental gradients are comprised gradually changing and predictable patterns of an abiotic factor, there is strong interplay between both biotic-biotic factors as well as biotic-abiotic factors. For example, species abundance usually changes along environmental gradients in a more or less predictable way.
Abiotic factors include ambient temperature, amount of sunlight, air, soil, water and pH of the water soil in which an organism lives. Biotic factors would include the availability of food organisms and the presence of biological specificity , competitors , predators , and parasites .