Deck 1 Flashcards
What is Ecology?
Ecology is the scientific discipline in which the relationships among living organisms and the interaction the organisms have with their environment are studied.
What is the Biosphere?
The portion of Earth that supports life.
What are biotic factors?
**The living factors in an organism’s environment. **
What are abiotic factors?
Nonliving factors in an environment.
What is a population?
Individual organisms of the same species that share the same geographic location at the same time.
What is a biological community?
What is an ecosystem?
A biological community and all of the abiotic factors that affect it.
What is a biome?
A large group of ecosystems that share the same climate and have similar types of communities.
What is a habitat?
An area where an organism lives.
What is a niche?
The role or position an organism has in its environment.
What is predation?
The act of on organism pursuing and consuming another organism for food.
What is symbiosis?
The close relationship when two or more organisms live together.
What is mutualism?
The relationship between two or more organisms that live closely together and benfit from each other.
What is commensalism?
A relationship where one organism benefits and the other is neither helped nor harmed.
What is parasitism?
A symbiotic relationship in which one organism benefits at the expense of another organism.
What is an autotroph?
An organism that collects energy from the sunlight and produces energy?
What is a heterotroph?
An organism that gets its energy by consuming other organisms.
What is an herbivore?
A heterotroph that eats only plants.
What is a carnivore?
Heterotrophs that prey on other heterotrophs.
What are omnivores?
Organisms that eat both plants and animals.
What is a detritivore?
Organisms that eat dead fragments of matter in an ecosystem.
What is the trophic level in a food web?
Every step of the food chain is the trophic level.
What is a food chain?
A simple model that shows how energy flows through an ecosystem.
What is a food web?
A model representing the many interconnected food chains and pathways in which energy flows through a group of organisms.
What is the biomass?
The total mass of living matter at each trophic level.
What is the biogeochemical cycle?
The exchange of energy through the biosphere.
