Interdependency of Species in the Food Web The concept of the food web is useful when one wants to understand the interdependency of species that live in a particular biome, and, further, how events in one biome can cause ripple effects that impact life in other biomes. This demonstrates the interdependency of all life, not just life in a particular biome. In order to understand this, it is important to understand what one means by the concept of a food web. Previously, people envisioned a food chain, with species being characterized as food or the one doing the eating. This helped people understand the relationship between different organisms and how some organisms formed an intermediate link between other organisms.

However, the idea of a food chain is actually overly simplistic. At different stages in their life cycles and at different opportunities, various species serve as both predator and prey, an idea that the food chain concept ignores. However, while there may be differences in roles dependent upon life stages, organisms in the food web tend to fall into one of three basic tropic levels: producers, consumers, and decomposers. Producers tend to be autotrophic and, therefore, do not directly rely on other organisms for nutrition, though they may take nourishment from the ground that is only there because of other organisms. Consumers and decomposers directly feed...

The ecosystem describes the relationship between all of those organisms. An ecosystem consists of living (biotic) and non-living (abiotic) components. The study of ecosystems include processes that link biotic and abiotic components along with energy transformation and biogeochemical cycles.
Conclusion

While ecosystems may seem extremely resilient, the reality is that there is a delicate balance of life within an ecosystem. If there is a disturbance at any level of the ecosystem, it can cause disturbances in other levels that can impact the entire ecosystem. Sometimes, the ecosystem is able to compensate for disturbances. For example, an ecosystem that is experiencing a decline in a particular producer species may be able to compensate with its other producers, and, as long as there are no other species that depend primarily on the threatened species for sustenance, the balance of the system, as a whole, may be unaffected. However, in many cases, it is impossible to substitute one species for another, and a decline or overabundance in one species can have a devastating impact across the entire ecosystem.

Moreover, while this paper has focused on the impact of changes in a food web, treating the food web as if it exists in isolation, the reality is that very few ecosystems actually work in isolation. Instead, ecosystems and biomes…