Levels of Organization
An individual living thing.
What is an organism?
Living components of an ecosystem.
What are biotic factors?
Organisms that produce their own food using sunlight.
What are producers (autotrophs)?
A complex network of feeding relationships in an ecosystem.
What is a food web?
A location where matter is stored, such as the atmosphere or oceans.
What is a reservoir?
A group of the same species living in the same area.
What is a population?
Nonliving environmental components like water, soil, and sunlight.
What are abiotic factors?
Organisms that obtain energy by consuming other organisms.
What are consumers (heterotrophs)?
A graphical model showing energy decreasing at higher trophic levels.
What is an energy pyramid?
The movement of matter between reservoirs.
What is flux?
Multiple populations living and interacting in an area.
What is a community?
The natural environment where an organism lives.
What is a habitat?
Organisms such as fungi or bacteria that break down dead matter.
What are decomposers?
The total mass of living tissue in a trophic level.
What is biomass?
The ability of an ecosystem to recover after disturbance.
What is resilience?
Living organisms interacting with nonliving environmental factors.
What is an ecosystem?
The role or job of an organism in its ecosystem.
What is a niche?
The position an organism occupies in a food chain.
What is a trophic level?
Energy lost as thermal energy during respiration.
What is heat loss?
A feedback process that stabilizes systems by reducing change. Like predator–prey population balance
What is negative feedback?
The global sum of all ecosystems where life exists.
What is the biosphere?
A species that has a disproportionately large impact on an ecosystem.
What is a keystone species?
The rule stating that only about 10% of energy moves to the next trophic level.
What is the 10% rule?
A chain reaction triggered by removing or adding a species in a food web.
What is a trophic cascade?
A feedback process that amplifies change and destabilizes systems. Like arctic ice melt warming loop
What is positive feedback?