Ecosystem
Living organisms interacting with one another and their physical environment.
An ecosystem is a community of organisms interacting with one another and with the physical environment in a particular place. Energy flows through food webs while matter such as water and nutrients cycles among organisms, soil, air, and water. Boundaries are useful for study but ecosystems also connect across landscapes.
Ecosystems are dynamic: seasons, disturbance, succession, and species interactions shape their structure. Resilience describes the capacity to absorb disturbance and reorganize while retaining important functions or identity. A system can cross thresholds, and recovery may be slow or incomplete, so the relevant time scale matters.
Managing an ecosystem begins with identifying the place, the ecological processes at stake, and the people who depend on or care for it. Monitoring should use repeatable indicators and local knowledge, then adjust actions as evidence changes. Interventions can have tradeoffs across species, livelihoods, and neighboring ecosystems; make those effects explicit.
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