Читать книгу Fundamentals of Conservation Biology - Malcolm L. Hunter Jr. - Страница 72

Flying over the landscape in an airplane you see patterns: dark green patches that are forests, a distant white line of snow‐capped mountains, blue patches and ribbons that are lakes and rivers, brown patches that are tilled fields, grey splotches that are urban areas, and so on. These are the coarse manifestations of an enormously complicated web of ecological interactions, a myriad of species interacting with one another and their physical environment. Despite this complexity, all is not chaos. There are patterns; some are so obvious that they can be seen from far above the Earth, and some are so subtle that we have little awareness or understanding of them. These patterns of interactions are the basis for ecosystems, and they are fundamental to the goal of maintaining biodiversity.