An Overview
An ecosystem consists of the biological community that occurs in some locale and the physical and chemical factors. These factors make up its non-living or abiotic environment. There are many examples of ecosystems — a pond, a forest, an estuary, a grassland. The boundaries are not fixed in any objective way. Although sometimes they seem obvious, as with the shoreline of a small pond. Usually, the boundaries of an ecosystem are chosen for practical reasons with the goals of the particular study.
What do we understand by the term Ecosystem?
The study of ecosystems mainly consists of the study of certain processes that link the biotic, components to abiotic components. The two main processes that ecosystem scientists study are Energy transformations and biogeochemical cycling. Ecology generally is defined as the interactions of organisms with one another and with the environment in which they occur. We can study ecology at the level of the individual, the population, the community, and the ecosystem.
Studies of individuals are concerned mostly about physiology, reproduction, development or behavior, and studies of populations usually focus on the habitat and resource needs of particular species, their group behaviors, population growth, and what limits their abundance or causes extinction. Studies of communities examine how populations of many species interact with one another. Such as predators and their prey, or competitors that share common needs or resources.
In ecosystem ecology, we put all of this together and we try to understand how the system operates as a whole. This means that, rather than worrying mainly about particular species, we try to focus on major functional aspects of the system. These functional aspects include such things as the amount of energy that is produced by photosynthesis, how energy or materials flow along with the many steps in a food chain, or what controls the rate of decomposition of materials or the rate at which nutrients are recycled in the system.
