Hyrarchi Ecology

HYRARCHY ECOLOGY

Ecological hierarchy theory describes the arrangement of biological organisms in relation to one another. At the simplest level of the hierarchy are individual organisms. At the individual level, interactions with other organisms are not considered. Moving up the hierarchy, ecologists have found more complex ways to describe the relationships between organisms. These culminate in the biosphere, which describes the totality of all living things on planet Earth

An individual is one organism and is also one type of organism (e.g., human, cat, moose, palm tree, gray whale, tapeworm, or cow in our example). The type of organism is referred to as the species.

Population It’s a group of individuals that all belong to the same species. Populations are geographically based; they live in a particular area. But the size or scale of that area can be variable

Communities are made up of all the populations of different species in a given area. in a given area Because once again the scale is flexible, determined by the person studying or writing about the community.

Ecosystem not only looking at all the different populations and species in the given area, but you’re also looking at the physical environment, the non-living or abiotic conditions (language alert: the prefix “a” means “without” and the root word “bio” means life, so abiotic is literally “without life” or in other words, non-living), and not just what they are, but how they impact the organisms, and in some cases how the organisms impact the physical environment.

Biosphere represents the totality of all things on Earth, including their interactions. The biosphere includes all ecosystems on Earth and how they interact together. By default, the biosphere includes climate, geology, the oceans and human pollution. This level of analysis can seem abstract, but it frequently has practical applications. Global climate change, for example, examines how the destruction of one ecosystem -- like the Amazon rainforest -- can lead to a loss of global climate regulation, and affect life on a part of Earth distant from the Amazon.