How often do you pause and think about the green around us? The amazingly beautiful trees, shrubs and diverse ground covers are really the lifeblood of the Earth. We were taught this in elementary school, but now we are so busy, we just don’t give it much thought. It is so easy to take plants for granted, we seldom acknowledge the full extent to which they benefit and provide us with life. Way back, we learned that plants produce the oxygen that we need to breathe and most often produce the critical foundations for entire food webs.
In an ecological community, organisms evolve and develop relationships that allow for the exchange of energy. These relationships allow organisms incapable of photosynthesis, to access energy from the sun. Plants occupy the first step or “trophic level” of the food web.