Ecology: (Ecosystem Oragnization) Flashcards
Organisms and their environment:
•environment: everything that affects an organism and everything an organism affects in its life.
•biotic components- living components of the environment.
-eg. other organisms, predators, food.
•abiotic components- non-living components of the environment.
-eg. sunlight, water, minerals.
Ecology:
•ecologists: scientists who study the interactions of organisms with one another and their environment.
•ecologists may study an individual organism, population or community.
•ecologists who study individual organisms want to know how the abiotic world affects behaviour and structure of organism.
Species:
•species: organisms that can breed with one another and produce fertile offspring.
-eg. Horse and donkey breed = infertile mule offspring.
Population:
•population: group of individuals of the same species living in a specific area at the same time.
•population ecologists describe changes in the size of a population.
Community:
•community: consists of all the individuals in all of the interacting populations in a given area.
•community ecologists typically study the interactions among the members of different populations.
-(Example: competition, predation).
Ecosystem:
•ecosystem: a community of populations, together with the abiotic factors that surround and affect it.
•an ecosystem can be small (log) or large (mountain side).
Environments change over time:
•changes in sunlight, temperature, available water can alter population size.
•as the population of one species changes, the population of its predators (decreases) and prey (increases) will also change.
•habitat can also be altered (i.e. fire, flood, rockslide).
The bigger picture: Earth’s biosphere:
•all the ecosystems in the world and their interactions make up the biosphere.
•populations are not randomly scattered throughout the biosphere.
•their distribution is related to the ways of biotic and abiotic components of an environment affect individual organisms.
