If you appraise something or someone, you consider them carefully and form an opinion about them. [formal] This prompted many employers to appraise their selection and recruitment policies. [VERB noun] Gloria slid an appraising eye over the rest of the rack before reaching for the dress.
(a) Natural ecosystem boundaries occur between a tropical evergreen and riparian forest, and between the riparian forest and the river that it borders. (b) Natural boundaries occur across the gradient from marine to intertidal to foreshore environments near the shore in temperate coastal regions.
The two main areas where the effect of biodiversity on ecosystem function have been studied are the relationship between diversity and productivity, and the relationship between diversity and community stability. Insurance Effect If an ecosystem contains more species then it will have a greater likelihood of having redundant stabilizing species, and it will have a greater number of species that respond to perturbations in different ways.