Home

Ecosystems, values & perils

An ecosystem is a community of plants and animals interacting with each other and the non-living environment. It can be large or small...a pond, a tree, or a huge forest or swamp can all be seen as ecosystems. (Often one hears the term "biome," which is a category or type of ecosystem found at various places around the world. For example, the Gobi Desert and Death Valley are both ecosystems within which animals, plants and the land interact. But the Gobi creatures and the Death Valley ones don’t interact, so one cannot say that the general term “desert” is an ecosystem. However, it is a TYPE of ecosystem and because it is found widely around the world and has similar traits everywhere, “desert” is one of the types of biomes. Other commonly accepted biomes include rainforest, temperate forest, taiga, grasslands, etc. Biologists do not all agree on how many biomes the world should be broken down into. In any case, any contiguous area within a biome can be studied as an ecosystem. (Scroll down for links to library documents on this topic.)

To the ecologist, an ecosystem is a system where energy from the sun and elements from the Earth cycle through a web of plants and animals, who eat each other and otherwise interact.

To the citizen, ecosystems provide economic, public-health and social benefits to humans -- and many of those services are at risk because humans damage and destroy ecosystems for profit. 

Our library contains these documents on ecosystems:

(1) Wetlands.