Importance of the Ecosystem

Importance of the Ecosystem

Rhonda Montgomery

American Intercontinental University

Abstract

Everything on our planet is connected in some way being a community of both living and nonliving things all working together in order to sustain life, this is considered to be an ecosystem in which there are various types including the grasslands, aquatic, desert, mountains and forest. All living things require a well-regulated ecosystem in order to thrive.

The ecosystem that I have chosen to discuss is the Grasslands which are areas that are dominated by grasses with a very limited amount of trees and shrubs that are located in the temperate as well as the tropical regions. There are two types of grassland ecosystems which include the savannahs being a tropical grassland which is dry having very little trees with the second being the prairies which is considered to be the temperate grasslands having absolutely no trees or shrubs, the prairie contains three different types of grasses including short, tall and mixed types.

A specific example of grasslands would be the grasslands of Africa where the ecosystem is widely open grass covered land having only a few dispersed trees and where the different species not only play an important/specific role. In the ecosystem the food chain works in the transferring of energy from one organism to the other.

The ecosystem structure, although there are no specific sets of criteria that make up the ecosystem, all of them include abiotic and biotic components, interactions and a known source of energy with the simplest containing just one plant, the biotic component with light exposure with water added which contains the nutrients needed for the growth of the plant, with the extreme being the biosphere which has all the organism/interactions between them and the earth, the abiotic environment with the most of the ecosystems falling between the extremes.

The main functions of...