What Is Continental Shelf Ecosystems

Trophic cascades are most common and clearly evident in low diversity benthic marine ecosystems 8 9 whereas top down consumer driven effects in benthic food webs are widely accepted their application to large pelagic marine ecosystems is more contentious.

What is continental shelf ecosystems.

A continental shelf is a portion of a continent that is submerged under an area of relatively shallow water known as a shelf sea. This site describes our current understanding of ecosystem properties of the northeast u s. In the northeast u s. The delicate ecosystem of the continental shelf is constantly studied and monitored by thousands of marine biologists around the world.

This article describes the habitat of the continental shelf. It is one of the sub categories within the section dealing with biodiversity of marine habitats and ecosystems it gives an overview about the characteristics processes such as sedimentation and biota. Effects of pollution and overfishing are devastating to the point of near extinction for some animals and loss of wetlands according to proceedings of the national academy of sciences pnas. An ecosystem can be categorized into its abiotic constituents including minerals climate soil water and sunlight and its biotic constituents consisting of all living members.

Transports between these carbon reservoirs exert critical. Even though they are underwater continental shelves are. Continental margin environments including estuarine salt marsh mangrove forest coral reef continental shelf and continental slope ecosystems are the interface zone between oceanic and terrestrial realms with gateways also to the atmosphere and solid earth sediment reservoirs. Almost all life on earth relies on photosynthetic organisms such as plants and algae.

Continental shelf large marine ecosystem nes lme and their importance in developing ecosystem based fisheries management for this region. Ecosystem the complex of living organisms their physical environment and all their interrelationships in a particular unit of space. A continental shelf is the edge of a continent that lies under the ocean continents are the seven main divisions of land on earth. A continental shelf extends from the coastline of a continent to a drop off point called the shelf break from the break the shelf descends toward the deep ocean floor in what is called the continental slope.

The continental margin between the continental shelf and the abyssal plain comprises a steep continental slope. Since 2003 the united states extended continental shelf project has been working to determine the geographical end of america s continental shelf past the 200 nautical miles outlined in the legal boundary.