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rainforest ecosystem
environment. All the living and nonliving things that surround and affect an organism. ecosystem. A community of organisms and the physical environment in which they live.
The interactions between living things and their non living environment makes up a total ecosystem; understanding any one part of it requires knowledge of how that part interacts with the others.
The living parts of an ecosystem are called biotic factors while the environmental factors that they interact with are called abiotic factors.
What Does an Ecosystem Need To Survive? In order to survive, ecosystems need five basic components: energy, mineral nutrients, water, oxygen, and living organisms.
An ecosystem may be defined as a structural and functional unit of the biosphere comprising living organisms and their non-living environment that interact by means of food chains and chemical cycles resulting in energy flow, biotic diversity and material cycling to form a stable, self supporting system.
The simplest definition of an ecosystem is that it is a community or group of living organisms that live in and interact with each other in a specific environment.
The ocean
The food chain is made up of four main parts – the sun, producers, consumers, and decomposers. Producers include all green plants. They use energy from the sun to make food. Consumers do not make their own food; they eat other plants or animals.
A food chain describes how energy and nutrients move through an ecosystem. At the basic level there are plants that produce the energy, then it moves up to higher-level organisms like herbivores. In the food chain, energy is transferred from one living organism through another in the form of food.
Food chains are important because they show the intricate relationships in ecosystems. They can reveal how each organism depends on someone else for survival. Food chains also display what happens when a problem occurs and a producer or consumer is lost.
Decomposers break down dead plants and animals. They also break down the waste of other organisms. They are an important element in the food chain because they keep up a continuous flow of nutrients for the primary producers.
Energy is transferred between organisms in food webs from producers to consumers. The energy is used by organisms to carry out complex tasks. The vast majority of energy that exists in food webs originates from the sun and is converted (transformed) into chemical energy by the process of photosynthesis in plants.
Energy flow is the flow of energy through living things within an ecosystem. All living organisms can be organized into producers and consumers, and those producers and consumers can further be organized into a food chain. Each of the levels within the food chain is a trophic level.
The first trophic level of the food chain has the most energy. This level contains the producers, which are all of the photosynthetic organisms.
It follows that the carnivores (secondary consumers) that feed on herbivores and detritivores and those that eat other carnivores (tertiary consumers) have the lowest amount of energy available to them.
Humans prey upon animals at all trophic levels, use almost half of the terrestrial earth to raise livestock (1), consume a large fraction of the sea’s plants and animals (2), and appropriate more than a quarter of terrestrial net primary productivity for food (3).
Consumers are organisms that eat other organisms. All organisms in a food chain, except the first organism, are consumers. The efficiency of a food chain depends on the energy first consumed by the primary producers. The primary consumer gets its energy from the producer.
Producers, also known as autotrophs, make their own food. They make up the first level of every food chain. Autotrophs are usually plants or one-celled organisms.