Through a case study on Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park, learners will explore how scientists study ecosystem
The idea that food webs and ecosystem functioning are intimately linked harkens back at least to the work of Forbes (1887). He pondered, in his lake as a microcosm paper, the complexity of lake ecosystems and how this complexity could be maintained given the complex network of trophic interactions. He also emphasized that spatial structure, both within and among lakes, could be important. Lindeman (1942) built on Forbes’s vision of a food web as a microcosm by linking a simplified view of food webs to ecosystem metabolism. Since then, much thinking has gone into understanding food webs and their links to ecosystem attributes (Odum 1957; Margalef 1963), but until recently the importance of space has not sufficiently been integrated into these thoughts. By contrast, the importance of space to populations and communities has been recognized for some time (Watt 1947; Skellam 1951; MacArthur & Wilson 1967), but the connection between this literature and food webs and ecosystems is only now being resolved (Loreau et al. 2003; Polis et al. 2004; Holt & Hoopes 2005; Pillai et al. 2009; Gravel et al. 2010a). Some progress has been made (e.g. Polis et al. 2004; Holyoak et al. 2005), but most of the work on the spatial food web and ecosystem properties has progressed along with two relatively independent traditions.
REF :links https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2011.01588.x
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