Question: why do you love ecosystems?

Thomas Doherty-Bone answered on 12 Nov 2013:

Animals are interesting. Plants are interesting. Microbes are interesting. The climate and cosmos are interesting. Put them all together, and they do things to each other, respond to each other. The environmental conditions influence life and life influences environmental conditions, which in turn influences life. There is a dynamic likelihood of things turning out differently, some things generally similar. And an ecosystem is anything where life occurs. If bacteria are found to live on Mars, thats an ecosystem, but apparently with life not so abundant that it fails to regulate the atmosphere. YOU and me and everyone can be considered an ecosystem given the number of species of bacteria, virus, protozoan, insect, fungus lives on us. I walk past a lawn and there I know there are thousands of species in there interacting, influencing their surroundings with a final net result of the ecosystem’s properties: biomass!

An ecosystem is the net consequence of life in a given place 🙂