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Ecosystem Components

In: Business and Management

Submitted By alexcasaretto
Words 745
Pages 3
Alex Marchino
SCI/ 256
4/14/2014
Week 2

Ecosystem Components Paper

An ecosystem is a very complex set of relationships among our living resources, habitats, and residents of a selected area. Which consist of plants, animals, fish, trees, birds, water, microorganisms, soil, and people. Lake Mead National Recreation Area (NRA) located in Nevada provides spectacular scenic vistas of Lake Mead and rugged and isolated backcountry. Amazing and drastic physical features include deep canyons, colorful soils, sheer cliffs, distant mountain ranges, dry washes, the lakes, and rock formations and mosaics of different vegetation (National Park Service, 2012). In this essay I will be discussing the major structural and functional dynamics of Lake Mead National Recreation Area (NRA) on Roger Spring and Black Canyon Springs and how the human being have affected this ecosystem by interacting with its biogeochemical cycles. I will show how knowing the ecosystem structure and function could help in its management and restoration of the ecosystems as well.

Black Canyon Spring is located downstream of Hoover Dam. Here, we can find springs of both the thermal (hot) and non-thermal (cold) variety with water temperatures ranging from about 55° to 136° Fahrenheit. Rogers Spring is located on “North Shore Complex” of the Lake Mead National Recreation Area. This area comprises of the terminal discharge areas for the regional carbonate-rock aquifer system from eastern Nevada (National Park Service, 2012). Chapin and colleagues (1996) recently extended this framework to develop a set of ecological principles concerning ecosystem sustainability. They defined “...a sustainable ecosystem as one that, over the normal cycle of disturbance events, maintains its characteristic diversity of major functional groups, productivity, and rates of biogeochemical cycling” (Chapin, 1996). Human

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