This chapter explores individual species' effects on ecosystem processes in pond food webs in an attempt to determine if these effects are predictable and consistent with respect to trophic position, biotic context, and abiotic factors.
Evolutionary biologists have focused extensively on understanding the coevolution of biotic advertisement in various contexts, including pollination and fruit dispersers, but an especially rich example comes from the theory of the sexual selection through mate choice.
Biomass production in temperate forests is most often interpreted within the context of biotic or top-down controls, such as species composition or disturbance.
These studies have, in combination, led to an improved understanding of how site-specific water chemistry affects bioavailability, and how metals exert toxicity at the organism site of action, at the biotic ligand in the context of the model to be described.
The striking similarity between the arrangement of cancer cells around blood vessels and vegetation around waterways leads us to consider tumor ecosystems within the context of the biotic and abiotic interactions in riparian ecosystems.
Studies of FLC and SCR have examined gene functions in natura, demonstrating that genes (or alleles) function at multiple levels in ecosystems in the context of various biotic and abiotic interactions (Fig. 1).
More generally, given the ever increasing potential for humans to impact the environment, and the complexities of land-use change and climate variability, it is likely that agro-ecological responses to management interventions will increase into the future, underscoring the importance of characterizing relevant biotic interactions in a community context (Thrall et al. 2007).
Indeed, the exchange of biotic invaders between agricultural and biomedical contexts demonstrates in striking terms the importance of evolutionary principles in applied management schemes.
It is harder to separate biotic and abiotic factors in the context of tumors, as their environment is a living organism, and thus by definition a biotic environment.
In the context of spatial ecology, biotic interactions have been generally dismissed as unimportant beyond the local scale (Fig. 2).
Interestingly, examining the bacterial transcriptomic response "in the context" of the other biotic stress responses as done in this study, has revealed that the down-regulation of genes encoding photorespiration functions, metalloproteases, sugar transport and sucrose/starch degradation (major CHO metabolism) are seen more specifically in response to bacterial infection.
