Semester Final Study Guide Flashcards
Energy Pyramid
An energy pyramid is a graphical model of energy flow in a community. The different levels represent different groups of organisms that might compose a food chain. From the bottom up, they are as follows Producers bring energy from nonliving sources into the community.
Food chain
a hierarchical series of organisms each dependent on the next as a source of food.
Food Web
a system of interlocking and interdependent food chains.
Producer
Producer is an organism, either a green plant or bacterium, which is part of the first level of a food chain and makes its own food.
Consumer
Consumer is an organism that feeds on plants or other animals for energy, like a deer.
Biome
a large naturally occurring community of flora and fauna occupying a major habitat, forest or tundra.
Ecology
the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings.
Nitrogen Cycle
the series of processes by which nitrogen and its compounds are interconverted in the environment and in living organisms, including nitrogen fixation and decomposition.
Water Cycle
the cycle of processes by which water circulates between the earth’s oceans, atmosphere, and land, involving precipitation as rain and snow, drainage in streams and rivers, and return to the atmosphere by evaporation and transpiration.
Carbon Cycle
the series of processes by which carbon compounds are interconverted in the environment, chiefly involving the incorporation of carbon dioxide into living tissue by photosynthesis and its return to the atmosphere through respiration, the decay of dead organisms, and the burning of fossil fuels.
Biotic Factors
Biotic factors are the living components of an ecosystem. They are sorted into three groups producers or autotrophs, consumers or heterotrophs, and decomposers or detritivores.
Abiotic Factors
a nonliving condition or thing, as climate or habitat, that influences or affects an ecosystem and the organisms in it. Abiotic factors can determine which species of organisms will survive in a given environment.
Predator
an animal that naturally preys on others.
Prey
an animal that is hunted and killed by another for food.
Succession
the order in which or the conditions under which one person after another succeeds to a property, dignity, title, or throne. The right of a person or line to succeed. The line having such a right.
