Ecosystem Vocabulary Flashcards
Producers
An organism that makes its own food; an organism that does not consume other plants or animals
consumers
an organism that eats other living things to get energy; an organism that does not produce its own food (related word: consume)
Predator
An animal that hunts and eats another animal
Prey
An animal that is hunted and eaten by another animal
Species
A group of organisms that share similar characteristics and can mate with each other to produce offspring
Populations
A population is all of the people who live in a certain region, city, or nation. The study of population is called demography. This field examines a wide range of statistics related to the inhabitants of a place. Human populations change constantly. Many factors affect the size of human populations, including supplies of food and water, climate and environment, life expectancy, and reproductive and mortality rates. Demographers study such factors in order to forecast future population increases or decreases.
Community
A group of different populations that live together and interact in an environment
Biodiversity
The many different types of life that exist in an environment
Biosphere
The part of Earth in which life can exist
Food Chain
A model that shows one set of feeding relationships among living things
Food Web
A model that shows one set of feeding relationships among living things
Habitat
The location in which an organism lives
Biome
A major ecological community such as grassland, tropical rain forest, or desert
Ecosystem
All the living and nonliving things in an area that interact with each other
Niche
The place or role that an organism has in its habitat
Mutualism
A relationship between two species of a plant, animal, or fungus in which one lives off the other and both organisms
Commensalism
In ecology, is a class of relationships between two organisms where one organism benefits from the other without affecting it.
Parasitism
A certain type of non mutual relationship found between two different species in which one organismknown as the parasitebenefits at the expense of the other organism
Bacteria Fixing-Nitrogen
Fixing bacteria are microorganisms present in the soil or in plant roots that change nitrogen gases from the atmosphere into solid nitrogen compounds that plants can use in the soil. That’s a mouthful! Let’s break this concept down.
Lightning Fixing
A process in which nitrogen (N2) in the atmosphere is converted into ammonia (NH3).[1] Atmospheric nitrogen or molecular dinitrogen (N2) is relatively inert: it does not easily react with other chemicals to form new compounds. The fixation process frees nitrogen atoms from their triply bonded diatomic form, N≡N, to be used in other ways.Nitrogen fixation, natural and synthetic, is essential for all forms of life because nitrogen is required to biosynthesize basic building blocks of plants, animals and other life forms, e.g., nucleotides for DNA and RNA, the coenzyme nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide for its role in metabolism (transferring electrons between molecules), and amino acids for proteins. Therefore, as part of the nitrogen cycle, it is essential for agriculture and the manufacture of fertilizer. It is also an important process in the manufacture of explosives (e.g. gunpowder, dynamite, TNT, etc.). Nitrogen fixation occurs naturally in the soil by nitrogen fixing bacteria affiliated with some plants (for example, Azotobacter and legumes). Some nitrogen-fixing bacteria have very close relationships with plants, referred to as symbiotic nitrogen fixation. Looser relationships between nitrogen-fixing bacteria and plants are often referred to as associative or non-symbiotic, as seen in nitrogen fixation occurring on rice roots. It also occurs naturally in the air by means of lightning.[2][3]All biological nitrogen fixation is done by way of nitrogenase metalloenzymes which contain iron, molybdenum, or vanadium. Microorganisms that can fix nitrogen are prokaryotes (both bacteria and archaea, distributed throughout their respective kingdoms) called diazotrophs. Some higher plants, and some animals (termites), have formed associations (symbiosis) with diazotrophs.
