Ecosystem Basics
This is all the living and nonliving things interacting in an environment.
What is an ecosystem?
These organisms make their own food using sunlight.
What are producers?
Energy in most ecosystems starts with this.
What is the sun?
This cycle moves water through evaporation, condensation, and precipitation.
What is the water cycle?
A group of the same kind of organism living together.
What is a population?
The living part of an ecosystem is called this.
What is the biotic factor?
An animal that only eats plants.
What is an herbivore?
A diagram that shows how energy moves from one organism to another.
What is a food chain?
: Plants take in this gas during photosynthesis.
What is carbon dioxide?
Different populations living in the same area.
What is a community?
Rocks, water, and sunlight are examples of these ecosystem parts.
What are abiotic factors?
An animal that eats both plants and animals.
What is an omnivore?
A model that shows how energy flows through many connected food chains.
What is a food web?
Animals breathe out this gas that plants use.
What is carbon dioxide?
The pathway showing who eats whom in an ecosystem.
What is a food chain?
This is the role or “job” an organism plays in its environment.
What is a niche?
An animal that hunts and eats other animals.
What is a predator?
In a food chain, these organisms always come first.
What are producers?
Decomposers return this important material to the soil for plants to reuse.
What are nutrients?
The process plants use to make food.
What is photosynthesis?
This describes how different species in an ecosystem depend on each other.
What is interdependence?
Mushrooms, bacteria, and fungi play this role in breaking down dead matter.
What are decomposers?
Only about this percent of energy is passed from one level to the next in an energy pyramid.
What is 10%?
This cycle explains how carbon moves between plants, animals, and the atmosphere.
What is the carbon cycle?
his word means the passing of matter and energy from one organism to another.
What is transfer?