Jackqueline Green
01/23/2012
SCI/256
Mrs Fields.

'Ecosystem'

An ecosystem is a combination of all the biological and physical properties of the natural world, usually in a recognizable area. If that definition sounds rather dauntingly academic, its for two reasons: First it is academic definition , and second, the term “ecosystem” is not easy to define satisfactory. Perhaps the best way to think of a ecosystem is to envision all the biological and physical events , plants growth, rain, temperature fluctuations, predictions, parasitism, death and so on occurring in a relatively large geographic are tied together by some dominating physical feature. Thus one could envision ,and for example ”,the prairie ecosystem,”which would encompass a large, more or less self-sustaining, relatively flat and dry region in which perennial grasses were the dominant vegetation,characteristic native vertebrate animals were predominantly herbivores such as bis on and rodents, and the major shaping physical forces were fire,wind and extreme temperature fluctuations. If you're bored by prairie ecosystem,then of course you could envision a coral reef ecosystem,a desert ecosystem,or the most complicated ecosystem of all,the tropical forest ecosystem. In the absence of humane disturbance, ecosystem tend to remain stable for relatively long periods thousand of years. During most of Earths history, destruction resulted from global events,typically of geological origin,such as the drifting of continents and the rising and falling of ocean levels. The fossils record shows us that some,if not all,continents have experienced dramatic changes over the several hundred million years of their history. For example,Americas prairie ecosystem “bread basket”. The great plains,where most of our corn and wheat are grown used to be a large sea. For this reason, enormous aquatic reptile fossils are found in places like Nebraska. In general,such changes occurs slowly,or at least at a rate most humans would consider slow. It took well over a hundred million years for Kansas to change from a vast sea of salt water populated by swimming monsters to a vast sea of grass populated by walking and running monsters. “The concept of the ecosystem is a highly instructional tool with which humans may easily learn a great deal about their planet and significantly enrich their trips to museum and zoos”. The concept is useful in this regards because it allows us to organized an enormous amount of information into manageable chunks. Much of this consists of information a well informed person already knows but simply hasn't thought about in an organized,ecological way. The African continent ,however ,has many ecosystem for example,the Sahara ,the East African Savannah, the steamy forests of the Congo River basin. Each tend to be characterized by its own mixture of temperature and moisture,as well as its own insisting of the species that lives in those ecosystem and feed on one another. The ten minute ecologist needs to be aware of two truly important concepts that apply to ecosystem. One of these concepts is that of flows the other one is that cycle. Perhaps the best analogy for flow and the cycling in ecosystem is the movement of money and goods through a society. Indeed,this analogy is so useful that professional ecologists share many ideas,methods,and metaphors with economists. Every time some one buy something, money flows and is transformed in the process. No matter whither the transaction is as simple as a child buying a piece of candy or as complex as a large real estate development ,money flows and is transformed. Societies also recycle items. Rumors and dad ideas are items that seems to move around fairly regularly thought out most societies,although in the case of these purely human constructor ,movement is often so disorganized that its difficult to tell where the cycle is. Most large cities have aluminum recycling opportunities and if they don't have actual citizens effort and pick ups sites then certainly they have can gleaners who dig through garbage to find aluminum worth money in the recycling market. Nevertheless with each transformation such as seeds into the mice some energy is lost. Where does the energy go?Thats a big question. Into heat. An ecosystem can be thought of as all these life process, involving the movement and exchanges of materials. Did you when the cat eat rats that how they get their energy. We all have to eat and drink to have that energy to survive.