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External factors, also called state factors, control the overall structure of an ecosystem and the way things work within it, but are not themselves influenced by the ecosystem. On broad geographic scales, climate is the factor that "most strongly determines ecosystem processes and structure".
An environmental factor, ecological factor or eco factor is any factor, abiotic or biotic, that influences living organisms. [1] Abiotic factors include ambient temperature , amount of sunlight , air, soil, water and pH of the water soil in which an organism lives.
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.
Ecological classification or ecological typology is the classification of land or water into geographical units that represent variation in one or more ecological features. . Traditional approaches focus on geology, topography, biogeography, soils, vegetation, climate conditions, living species, habitats, water resources, and sometimes also anthropic factors.
Fire ecology – Study of fire in ecosystems – which looks at the role of fire in the environment of plants and animals and its effect on ecological communities; Functional ecology – branch of ecology Pages displaying wikidata descriptions as a fallback – the study of the roles, or functions, that certain species (or groups thereof) play ...
In 1969, Eugene Odum published The Strategy of Ecosystem Development, a paper that was highly influential to conservation and environmental restoration. Odum argued that ecological succession was an orderly progression toward a climax state where “maximum biomass and symbiotic function between organisms are maintained per unit energy flow."
Ecosystems may be habitats within biomes that form an integrated whole and a dynamically responsive system having both physical and biological complexes. Ecosystem ecology is the science of determining the fluxes of materials (e.g. carbon, phosphorus) between different pools (e.g., tree biomass, soil organic material).
Resistance is a measure of how little the variable of interest changes in response to external pressures. Inertia (or persistence) implies that the living system is able to resist external fluctuations. In the context of changing ecosystems in post-glacial North America, E.C. Pielou remarked at the outset of her overview,