A community of plants and animals within a particular physical environment that is linked by a flow of materials through the non-living (abiotic) as well as the living (biotic) sections of the system. In practice, the hierarchy is: cell, organism, population, community, ecosystem, landscape, biome, and biosphere, although T. Allen and T. Hoekstra (1992) point out that this hierarchy incorporates conceptionally different, non-homogeneous levels of organization, and should therefore be regarded with suspicion. Seastedt et al. (2008) ESA Online J., DOI: 10.1890/070046, suggest that the focus in ecosystem management should be less on restoring ecosystems to their original state and more on sustaining new, healthy ecosystems that are resilient to further environmental change.