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Trophic Level Dynamics
Trophic levels is a sub unit of a food web in which explains the transfer of energy from one part of the ecosystem to another. This a is very important concept when understanding the roles that each organism plays with in a food web.

Trophic levels can be illustrated as numbers determining how far the organism is along the food chain


 * 1) Level One: Producers, plants that can generate their own food using solar radiation.
 * 2) Level Two: Consumers, organism often known as animals that consume their energy from eating the producers.
 * 3) Level Three: Decomposers, organisms that breakdown the dead matter of consumers and producers and return the nutrients back into the system.

All functions, including all life within an ecosystem are centered off one external source of energy, solar radiation. Portions of this solar radiation is consumed by producers (plants) and turned into organic substances to be used by inorganic substances (consumers). Plants release portions of this energy back into the ecosystem through a catabolic process. Animals then consume the large amounts of potential energy that is being released from the producers. This system is always followed by death of the consumer organism which then returns nutrient back into the ecosystem to allow suitable growth windows for the plants, and the cycle returns again. This classification of breaking down the cycles into levels has made for understanding ecological succession much more informative for ecologist when observing the transfer of energy within a system.

Top-Down and Bottom-Up Affect
A common question with trophic level dynamics is the ability to regulate resources and production. The usage and interaction between resources have a large impact on the structure of the food webs as a whole. Temperature plays a big role in food web interactions including top-down and bottom-up forces within ecological communities  REF19) . Bottom-up regulations within a food web is when resource availability at the base or bottom of the food web, increases productivity which then will climb the chain and influence the biomass available to higher trophic organism. Top-down regulations is when the predator populations increase which limits the amount of the prey population available, this limits the availability of energy of lower trophic levels (REF19). Numerous biotic and abiotic factors have the ability to alter the importance of top-down and bottom-up interactions (REF19).

Trophic Cascade
Another example of food web interactions is a concept called trophic cascade. Understanding trophic cascade has allowed for ecologist to better understand structure and dynamics of food webs within an ecosystem. This idea of trophic cascade allows for keystone predators to structure an entire food web in terms of how they interact with their prey (REF 22). Trophic cascade can cause a drastic change in the energy flow with in a food web. For example if a top predator often called keystone species consumes organism below them in the food web will change preys density and behavior, this affects the abundance of organism consumed further down the chain or also know as cascading down the tropic levels. Empirical evidence shows that trophic cascade is much more prevalent in terrestrial food webs rather than aquatic food webs (REF22)