Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun An ecological community together with its environment, functioning as a unit.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
system formed by anecological community and itsenvironment thatfunctions as aunit . - noun The interconnectedness of organisms (plants, animals, microbes) with each other and their
environment . - noun business, marketing A set of interconnected
products andservices .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a system formed by the interaction of a community of organisms with their physical environment
Etymologies
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Examples
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In fact, the term ecosystem refers to a self-organizing and self-regulating interaction of independent organisms; it is not a checklist of the local flora and fauna.
Forbes.com: News Daniel Isenberg 2012
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Ongoing research projects include: evaluating the ‘insurance value’ of biodiversity in the provision of ecosystem services; creating a framework for understanding how ecosystem structure, function and process relate to the literature’s use of the term ecosystem services; global scale mapping and valuation of ecosystem services using GIS land cover maps and environmental economic valuation techniques.
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These days the Newfoundland ecosystem is being altered by over browsing from the more than 750,000 moose that call the Rock home.
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University of South Florida's Ernst Peebles said the oil on the floor "is undermining the ecosystem from the bottom up."
Gulf Oil Spill 6 Month Anniversary: A Look At The Health Of The Ocean AP 2010
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The first step to recovery of the Gulf marine ecosystem is to identify all sources of past, present and future environmental degradation, including fully understanding the long-term impacts of the BP oil disaster.
Rocky Kistner: Feeling Abandoned, Gulf Coast Residents Issue A Call To Arms Rocky Kistner 2010
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These days the Newfoundland ecosystem is being altered by over browsing from the more than 750,000 moose that call the Rock home.
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The first step to recovery of the Gulf marine ecosystem is to identify all sources of past, present and future environmental degradation, including fully understanding the long-term impacts of the BP oil disaster.
Rocky Kistner: Feeling Abandoned, Gulf Coast Residents Issue A Call To Arms Rocky Kistner 2010
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University of South Florida's Ernst Peebles said the oil on the floor "is undermining the ecosystem from the bottom up."
Gulf Oil Spill 6 Month Anniversary: A Look At The Health Of The Ocean AP 2010
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But the FCC said last year that a "healthy broadband ecosystem" is only possible if other devices can do the same thing.
Media Morning: Will the FCC get tough or play nice with broadband providers? 2010
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If Europeans were whales, biologists would be alarmed that their ecosystem is not healthy.
The Health Care Market, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009
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“If we take the definition of an ecosystem as ‘a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment’, then this is almost certainly true of the plastisphere,” says Robyn Wright, of the pharmacology department at Dalhousie University in Canada, and author of the June study.
Welcome to the ‘plastisphere’: the synthetic ecosystem evolving at sea Russell Thomas 2021
ruzuzu commented on the word ecosystem
"All around |Walter| Cannon, theorists were thrilling to the idea of self-righting systems, resistant to the buffeting forces of change. The English botanist Arthur Tansley coined the word “ecosystem” in 1935; the maintenance of stability would soon be described as one of the cardinal properties of ecologies. Soon economists were relating homeostasis to self-correcting markets; Norbert Wiener, the mathematician, saw that machines and creatures might be governed by autonomous control systems stabilized by “feedback” loops. Cells, cities, societies, even political institutions—all had the capacity to steady their states through the actions of self-regulated and counterpoised forces."
-- "My Father’s Body, at Rest and in Motion" by Siddhartha Mukherjee (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/08/my-fathers-body-at-rest-and-in-motion)
January 4, 2018