Community Structure and Trophic Level Interactions in the Terrestrial Ecosystems: A Review

Organisms have their own patterns of distribution and biological organizations functioning in the natural system. Community is one of the hierarchies of ecological organizations composed of different species of organisms interacting in space and time. Photosynthesis is the fundamental biological process by which radiant energy is converted to chemical energy and thereby readily becomes available for all living things existing on the planet earth [1]. Consequently, the type and extent of primary productivity determines the distribution, abundance, and diversity of consumers that live being subordinate to the photosynthetic products of green plants especially in the terrestrial ecosystems. There are several factors which could determine the net annual primary productivity and plant biomass production as well as its distribution among producers and various trophic groups of consumers. The major factors may include water and nutrient availability, climate, plant defenses, environmental heterogeneity, disturbance, stochiometry, and consumption by herbivores [2,3]. The interactions of plants and animals go back to evolutionary times [4]. Various components of the terrestrial ecosystems naturally work towards regulating and controlling the primary productivity and distribution of biomass among plants and animals across the various trophic levels of the biological community. Understanding how the biological communities in the terrestrial ecosystems function in the presence of different structural components is the central point of plant-animal interactions both from ecological and evolutionary contexts. However, various classical approaches dealing with biological communities have still incomplete information to give straightforward evidences regarding the complex ecological and evolutionary processes and the controlling mechanisms in the terrestrial ecosystems [3]. This is because, compared with the aquatic ecosystems, the dynamics, complexity, and diversity of the terrestrial communities are too tremendous to precisely enumerate and quantify. For example, the GWH proposed that some parts of the world have remained green Volume 2 Issue 6 2017