What is the importance of recycling nitrogen and carbon in an ecosystem and organisms are responsible for cycling energy through an ecosystem?
The importance of the carbon and nitrogen cycles to ecosystems is that both are essential elements for living things. These cycles help in moving these elements between living things and the environment, and they provide the raw materials for biosynthesis. All living organisms, bimolecular and cells are made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus. These elements are essential for life. It is important to recycle and continuously replenish nutrients into the environment for life to exist. Both plants and animals release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere during cellular respiration. The carbon cycle is a closed system, and recycling carbon is the only way to replenish it for an ecosystem. This ensures that there is no real long-term drain on the Earth's nutrients, despite millions of years of plant and animal activity. Nutrient recycling is the way in which elements are continuously being broken down and/or exchanged for reuse between the living and non-living components of an ecosystem. The carbon and nitrogen cycles are important to ecosystems because they provide the nutrients that plants need to grow. Plants use carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make food, and they use nitrogen from the soil to make proteins. The carbon cycle involves processes like photosynthesis and celluar respiration, while the nitrogen cycle uses processes such as nitrogen fixation and denitrification to cycle nitrogen from the atmosphere into the ground into living things and back into the atmosphere. Decomposers transform matter back into inorganic forms that can be recycled within the ecosystem. So, the energy that enters an ecosystem as sunlight eventually flows out of the ecosystem in the form of heat. These atoms can be a part of both living things like plants and animals, as well as non-living things like water, air, and even rocks. The same atoms are recycled over and over in different parts of the Earth. This type of cycle of atoms between living and non-living things is known as a biogeochemical cycle. Nutrient cycling is important for: It is required for the transformation of nutrients from one form to another so that it can be readily utilized by different organisms, e.g. plants cannot take atmospheric nitrogen and it has to be fixed and converted to ammonium and nitrate for uptake. Valuable elements such as carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, phosphorus, and nitrogen are essential to life and must be recycled in order for organisms to exist. Nutrient cycles are inclusive of both living and nonliving components and involve biological, geological, and chemical processes.
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