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| | Communities and Succession |
 | | When G. Evelyn Hutchinson and his student Raymond Lindeman provided clear, albeit highly complicated, mathematical models to depict the various interacting component parts of the ecosystem, ecologypromised to become a fully mathematized and experimental discipline. |
 | | Lindeman, in particular, contributed to this important change when he published a paper in 1942 that synthesized the work of Clements, Elton, Tansley and his mentor Hutchinson by speaking of biogeochemical cycling, energy flow through trophic levels and dynamic succession. |
 | | Even more importantly, he saw the continuous cycling of material through the ecosystem as an energy-driven process that included producers (organisms that fixed the energy from the sun), consumers and decomposers, which cycled material back to the producers as energy from the sun continued its one-way flow through the ecosystem. |
| ecology.botany.ufl.edu /ecologyf02/Communities.html (3242 words) |
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