The ecosystem concept In 1935, an ecologist from Britain, Sir Arthur Tansley, coined the term ecosystem as any set of interacting species and its environment. This sounds simple, but to study questions at the ecosystem level requires that we learn to think about organisms and the environment in terms of a continuum of energy and elements. Elements and energy stored in plants flow to animals that eat them.
Elements flow back to the environment and energy is lost to space if organisms die and decompose.
The calcium that makes up part of your bones may once have been part of a mineral from rocks near Northfield, a crab shell in the ocean, or a particle of atmospheric dust. The energy that fuels your metabolism and keeps your body functioning as a highly organized unit was once sunlight transformed into plant biomass, which was then transformed into animal biomass. Part of this energy you release as heat to the atmosphere, which contributes, in a very small way, to earth's climate. It's a wonderful, holistic way to think about how intimately life is related to the abiotic world. This is ecosystem ecology in its purest sense.