Ecology Study Guide Questions Flashcards
(21 cards)
Ecosystem
The community of organisms that live in a particular area, along with their nonliving environment.
Producer
An organism that can make its own food.
Consumer
An organism that obtains energy by feeding on other organisms.
Scavenger
A carnivore that feeds on the bodies of dead or decaying organisms.
Decomposer
An organism that gets energy by breaking down biotic wastes and dead organisms, and returns raw materials to the soil and water.
Food chain
A series of events in an ecosystem in which organisms transfer energy by eating and by being eaten.
Food web
The pattern of overlapping feeding relationships or food chains among the various organisms in an ecosystem.
Energy pyramid
A diagram that shows the amount of energy that moves from one feeding level to another in a food web.
Heterotrophs
An organism that cannot make its own food and gets food by consuming other living things.
Autotroph
An organism that is able to capture energy from sunlight or chemicals and use it to produce its own food.
Primary succession
The series of changes that occur in an area where no soil or organisms exist.
Secondary succession
When the soil is already there and so it starts with grass and goes to flowers, bushes to, trees and then become the ecosystem again
Pioneer species
Animals that are not native to the land and the land around traveled distance to this new ecosystem
Weathering
The chemical and physical processes that break down rock and other substances.
Erosion
The process by which water, ice, wind, or gravity moves weathered particles of rock and soil.
Deposition
Process in which sediment is laid down in new locations.
Abiotic
Non living thing in an ecosystem like a rock
Biotic
Living organisms that are in the ecosystem
Nitrogen fixation
When there is lost and lot of nitrogen in the atmosphere
Biomass
Is the amount of living in a living thing
Trophic level
The level that is trophic
