Humanity's Last Treasure: Browsing Ecological Landscapes

Author: Dong Quan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-10-01
Features: This book begins with biodiversity, exploring the relationships between organisms and between organisms and nature. The interactions and transformations among these different forms are of great interest to natural ecologists. Faced with the rich and diverse world of life, we will use the basic principles of ecology to explore the interactions between organisms and their environment with the readers. From an ecological perspective and from the whole Earth, the biosphere is an integrated system connected through various ecological links. The biosphere on Earth is the lifeboat of the planet. Therefore, this book discusses the ecosystems and natural phenomena on Earth, starting from the broad to the specific and from the distant to the near, introducing forests, grasslands, deserts, rivers, ponds and lakes, wetlands, coastal areas, and oceans in order. Very few ecosystems on Earth are isolated or closed. Instead, they are interconnected, with exchanges of energy and matter. Therefore, after introducing various ecosystems one by one, we will inevitably discuss complex ecosystems and ecological landscapes. Humans have greatly altered and continue to alter the face of the Earth, exerting significant, even irreversible impacts on nature on a global scale. Thus, at the end of this book, let us reflect on ourselves and examine the role of humans in ecosystems, measuring human dependence on and impact on these ecosystems. Like many other books that seek to understand and describe the natural world, the chapters in this book may be arbitrary, and the observations may be scattered. We have merely taken a small sample from the vast observations people have made of nature.