The Land Pyramid

The land where we belong has always given us food, water, water and soil, etc. for the survival. The land stores energy with the help of biotic and other elements. Aldo Leopold created an important structure of living beings that survives on the land. Plants absorb energy from the sun. This energy flows through a circuit called the biota, which may be represented by a pyramid consisting of layers.

(Read more: Aldo Leopold, ‘A Sand County Almanac’ Pub: Dover Publications, N.Y)

The bottom layer is soil. A plant layer rests on soil, an insect’s layer on plants, a bird and rodents layer on the insects, and so on up through various animal groups to the apex layer, which consists of the layer carnivores. Thus, each successive layer has to depend on those below it for food for other services, and each in turn furnishes food and services to the layer above. Proceeding upward, each successive layer decreases in numerical abundance. Thus, for every carnivore there is hundreds of his prey, millions of insects, uncountable plants. The pyramidal form of the system reflects this numerical progression from apex to the bottom. Man (omnivores) shares an intermediate layer with the bears, raccoons, and squirrels, which eat both meat and vegetables.