The Living Environment Flashcards
Definitions from the N5 unit
What is a habitat?
The place where an organism lives.
What is a community?
All the organisms that live together in an ecosystem.
What is a population?
The number of organisms of one species in an ecosystem.
What is an ecosystem?
A natural biological unit made up of living and non-living parts, ie the community and the habitat.
What is biodiversity?
The variety that exists among living things.
What is a species?
A group of organisms that can interbreed to produce fertile offspring.
What does biotic mean?
A living feature of an ecosystem, such as food supply, disease, predation.
What does abiotic mean?
A non-living feature of an ecosystem, such as light intensity, precipitation, temperature, wind speed, wind direction.
What is adaptation?
Any feature that makes an organism well suited to living in its environment.
What is competition?
A negative interaction that occurs between organisms whenever there is demand for a limited resource.
What is a carnivore?
An animal that only eats other animal material.
What is a herbivore?
An animal that only eats plant material.
What is an omnivore?
An animal that eats both plant and animal material.
What is a detritivore?
An animal that feeds on dead organic matter, e.g., wood louse, earthworm, maggot.
What is a decomposer?
Bacteria and fungi that feed on dead organic matter at a microscopic level.
What is a producer?
An organism that can produce its own food; usually a green plant that produces its own food via photosynthesis.
What is a primary consumer?
A herbivore that eats the producer in a food chain.
What is a secondary consumer?
An animal that eats the primary consumer in a food chain.
What is a tertiary consumer?
An animal that eats the secondary consumer in a food chain.
What is a niche?
The role played by a species within a community: where it lives, what it eats and what eats it.
What is a non-native species?
A species introduced through human action (accidental or deliberate) outside its native distribution.
What is an invasive non-native species (INNS)?
Any non-native animal or plant that has the ability to spread and cause damage to the environment, the economy, our health or the way we live.
What is an indicator species?
The presence, absence or abundance of certain living organisms that show an environment is affected by a particular set of environmental conditions.
