Paris, France

Agrosciences, Environment, Territory, Landscape, Forests - Climate, Land-Use and Ecosystem Services

Master's
Language: EnglishStudies in English
Subject area: physical science, environment
Qualification: M2
Climate
Climate is the statistics of weather over long periods of time. It is measured by assessing the patterns of variation in temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, precipitation, atmospheric particle count and other meteorological variables in a given region over long periods of time. Climate differs from weather, in that weather only describes the short-term conditions of these variables in a given region.
Ecosystem
An ecosystem is a community made up of living organisms and nonliving components such as air, water, and mineral soil. Ecosystems may be studied either as contingent collections of plants and animals, or as structured systems and communities that are governed by general rules. The biotic and abiotic components interact through nutrient cycles and energy flows. Ecosystems include a network of interactions among organisms, and between organisms and their environment. Ecosystems can be of any size but one ecosystem has a specific, limited space. Some scientists view the entire planet as one ecosystem.
Ecosystem Services
Ecosystem services are the many and varied benefits that humans freely gain from the natural environment and from properly-functioning ecosystems. Such ecosystems include, for example, agroecosystems, forest ecosystems, grassland ecosystems and aquatic ecosystems. Collectively, these benefits are becoming known as 'ecosystem services', and are often integral to the provisioning of clean drinking water, the decomposition of wastes, and the natural pollination of crops and other plants.
Environment
Environment may refer to:
Landscape
A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms and how they integrate with natural or man-made features.
Territory
A territory is an administrative division, usually an area that is under the jurisdiction of a state. In most countries, a territory is an organized land controlled division of an area that is controlled by a country but is not formally developed into, or incorporated into, a political unit of the country that is of equal status to other political units that may often be referred to by words such as "provinces" or "states". In international politics, a territory is usually a non-sovereign geographic area which has come under the authority of another government; which has not been granted the powers of self-government normally devolved to secondary territorial divisions; or both.
Ecosystem
The organization of life extends beyond the individual organism to the biosphere, the zone of air, land, and water at the surface of the Earth where organisms exist. Individual organisms belong to a population, which is all the members of a species within a particular area. The populations of a community interact among themselves and with the physical environment (e.g., soil, atmosphere, and chemicals), thereby forming an ecosystem.
Sylvia S. Mader, Biology (10th ed., 2010), Ch. 1. A View of Life.
Ecosystem
If we recognise that every ecosystem can also be viewed as a food web, we can think of it as a circular, interlacing nexus of plant animal relationships (rather than a stratified pyramid with man at the apex)... Each species, be it a form of bacteria or deer, is knitted together in a network of interdependence, however indirect the links may be.
Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (1982).
Ecosystem
Ecosystems are characterized by chemical cycling and energy flow, both of which begin when photosynthetic plants, aquatic algae, and some bacteria take in solar energy and inorganic nutrients to produce food in the form of organic nutrients.
Sylvia S. Mader, Biology (10th ed., 2010), Ch. 1. A View of Life.
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