Ecosystem

Ecosystem

Ecosystem is a complex system made up of the numerous relations between its biotic and its abiotic components and the environment.

Animals and plants are the biotic components, whereas  light,  water,  ground, rain and climate are the abiotic  elements of the ecosystem.

Biotic elements have different roles in the ecosystem:

PRODUCTORS (green plants, algae and some bacteria) use solar energy to convert inorganic molecules like hydrogen into organic compounds. Producers use such compounds to live and  to grow up.

CONSUMERS  - Herbivorous beings can't produce their nourishment so they eat producers.

                         -Carnivorous beings eat herbivorous beings to live and grow up.

DECOMPOSERS (fungai and bacteria) eat the tissues of dead consumers.

As you can see, there's a close relation between all  living beings and  indeed they are part of a complex food chain, where energy is continuously transferred from an organism to another one.

In an ecosystem, abiotic matters can be split into 2 groups:

Macronourishing elements  ( like oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon and calcium).

Living beings need the previous elements in big quantities.

Micronourishing elements (like iron and magnesium).

Living beings need the previous elements but in small quantities.

There are different kinds of ecosystems: for example desert, savannah, steppe, wood, rainforest and cloud forest.

A wood is an ecosystem altered by human beings made up of woody beings. There are lots of woods of beech trees, birches and pine forests in FVG.

A forest is the result of the interaction between different ecosystems in a wide area made up of woods. In a forest you can find pastures, freshwater systems and clearings.

Water ecosystems can be: freshwater ecosystems like rivers, lakes, ponds and torrents or sea ecosystems like oceans, estuaries or coral reefs.

There are even artificial ecosystems like metropolises, villages and fields.

A field is different from a natural ecosystem because:

•-         farmers delete all the vegetal and animal species that could endanger his plantation.

•-         farmers bring energy to the fields with pesticides and machineries

•-         harvest (biomass) is taken away from the field, that needs chemical fertilizers and pesticides to produce plants again. Many of these products contain substances like DDT* that  very often endanger ecosystems and cause different problems to their species.

This is a great problem because unchanged ecosystems are fundamental  for human beings. Indeed they purify the water and the air and offer outstanding chances to develop economy and tourism around the world.

A wood, a lake, a beach, a river or the whole world can be thought like an ecosystem with its own features. Ecosystems that are close and have similar elements form a biome.

Forestry consists in all the possible human interventions to benefit from forests but also to rescue them. Indeed human beings are rarely aware that their behavior (that sometimes isn't good) affects ecosystems very much and endangers them.

The ecological succession is the "story" of an ecosystem. Indeed, during the march of time, pioneers (simple living beings that first managed to live in a particular "inhospitable" environment),change some of the environment's characters to make it comfortable for more complex living beings.                                 After numerous levels of evolution of these living beings, an ecosystem becomes stable.

* DDT is a chemical compound that can cause acute diseases to living  beings (man too).

In Borneo, for example,  people used DDT  to kill some bugs who are malaria holders. But this chemical compound killed many other bugs too (and of course all the organism who eat bugs and mice died). As a consequence, mice survived and caused numerous infectious diseases between the population of Borneo.