Ecosystem Components
A group of two or more species that live in the same area and interact with each other.
What is community?
An organism that creates its own food or energy.
What is producer?
An area of tall, mostly evergreen trees that receives a high amount of rainfall.
What is rainforest?
An interaction where one organism, the predator, eats all or part of another organism, the prey.
What is predation?
The maximum population size of a biological species that can be sustained by a specific environment.
What is carrying capacity?
The natural environment where a species of organism lives and thrives.
What is habitat?
An organism that obtains energy by eating other organisms, rather than producing its own food through photosynthesis or chemosynthesis.
What is consumer?
Ecosystem characterized by a relatively high cover of grasses and other graminoid vegetation in an open, often rolling, landscape with little or no cover of trees and shrubs.
What is grassland?
A relationship between organisms or species that struggle to obtain limited resources in the same ecosystem.
What is competition?
The number of live births per thousand of population per year.
What is birth rate?
The role a species plays in its environment, including how it interacts with other species and acquires resources.
What is niche?
An organism that breaks down dead or decaying organic material, such as plants and animals, and releases nutrients back into the environment.
What is decomposer?
A cold, treeless plain with harsh conditions that make it difficult for plants and animals to survive.
What is tundra?
A relationship between two organisms where one organism, the parasite, benefits at the expense of the other, the host.
What is parasitism?
A measurement of how many people live in a specific area.
What is population density?
Living or once-living components of an ecosystem, such as plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi.
What is biotic?
A series of organisms that eat each other, passing energy and nutrients along the line.
What is food chain?
Bodies of water where rivers meet the sea.
What is estuary?
A type of interaction between two or more species where each species benefits.
What is mutualism?
A population growth pattern that is influenced by population size and natural resistance, resulted in a sustainable maximum point called the carrying capacity.
What is logistic growth?
Non-living components of an ecosystem that affect the environment and the way organisms function.
What is abiotic?
The position of an organism in a food chain or web, based on its feeding habits and energy source.
What is trophic levels?
A permanently frozen layer on or under the earth's surface.
What is permafrost?
A symbiotic relationship between two species where one organism benefits from the relationship while the other is not affected.
What is commensalism?
A model for population growth that occurs when a population increases rapidly over time, doubling in size each time it divides.
What is exponential growth?