Key Ecology Terms

In this video we look at a few keys words that you will come across throughout ecology. An ecosystem is made up of all of the communities that live in it, every single organism from small to big and lots of environmental factors like sunlight and shade in the woodland, streams and other things. It is defined as “a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment.” A habitat is the area or environment in which an organism naturally lives - so the woodland in this example. It describes the geographical area occupied by the ecosystem, whereas the ecosystem is the interactions between everything living within it, as well as non-living factors. Populations are all members of the same species in the habitat at one time. Whereas populations describes just one species, a community is all of the organisms in the habitat at one time. In a woodland, the community is the foxes, rabbits, insects, plants, fungi and everything that is living in it. A niche describes the role of a species within an ecosystem. A species is a group of potentially interbreeding individuals, which do not normally reproduce with other species to produce viable, fertile offspring.