Aquatic ecosystems are characterized by a relative abundance of open water and can be divided into two general types: marine and freshwater.
Marine systems cover about 71 per cent of the Earth's surface and contain approximately 97 per cent of the planet's water, but generate only 32 per cent of the world's net primary production. Major marine zones are the oceanic (open ocean), the neritic (that portion of the ocean that lies over the continental shelf and is relatively shallow), the profundal (the deep or bottom waters), and the benthic (bottom substrate). Most marine carbon is fixed in the lighted layer of the ocean and upon sinking provides the food base for profundal and benthic organisms. The neritic zone is usually more productive than the rest of the ocean because of upwellings of nutrient-rich profundal waters and contributions from rivers; it also contains the greatest biotic diversity (Couch and Fournie, 1993).
Smaller, but especially productive, zones include the intertidal...
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Bibliography
Couch, J. A., and Fournie, J. W. (eds), 1993. Pathobiology of Marine and Estuarine Organisms. Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 552 pp.
Ford, T. E. (ed.), 1993. Aquatic Microbiology: An Ecological Approach. Boston, Mass.: Blackwell, 518 pp.
Likens, G. E. (ed.), 1985. An Ecosystem Approach to Aquatic Ecology: Mirror Lake and its Environment. New York: Springer-Verlag, 516 pp.
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© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Hughes, R.M. (1999). Aquatic ecosystem. In: Environmental Geology. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4494-1_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4494-1_18
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