Environment

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Devil's Punchbowl Waterfall, New Zealand.
Devil's Punchbowl Waterfall, New Zealand.

Contents

[edit] Introduction

Environment can have several meanings. It can refer to the surroundings or ecosystem in which organisms live, hence the organism's environment. So for a marine organism the environment would be that part of the ocean in which it lives.

In a larger sense, the environment comprises all living and non-living things that occur naturally on Earth.

ENVIRONMENT
Marine | Freshwater | Coastal | Terrestrial | Extreme


[edit] The natural environment

Time range (Earth): Hadean-Recent

The natural environment, can thus refer to any environments that is not the result of human activity or intervention, including the Biosphere, Geosphere, Hydrosphere, Atmosphere, etc as a whole. Of course for some 4.5 billion years these were the only environments on Earth.

As far as living organisms go, there are at least four or five types of environment [1]:

To these can be added

[edit] The human-modified environment

Time range (Earth): Holocene-Recent

Within a very tiny slice of time (constituting the second half of the Holocene, from about 5000 years ago or so until now) there has occured the human-made environment (agricultural, urban) which has progressively modified all the natural environments. There is also the concept of the cultural environment (which is included under the noosphere).

[edit] Reference

[1] The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Life Sciences, ed. Adrian Friday & David S. Ingram, Cambridge University Press 1985.

[edit] Credits

MAK061107 (a bit of material from wikipedia)

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