Ecology and Biodiversity

The ecosystem is divided into two main components viz. Biotic (the living) and Abiotic (the non-living).

It consists of everything that includes living organisms on earth.

The surroundings where organisms live are called their habitat.

All the plants, animals and protists living in a forest make up a community. A community is all of the living or biotic things in one place at one time. A population is just one species in one area at one time. A phylum is a subdivision of a kingdom. 

Abiotic factors describe factors like moisture, oxygen, carbon dioxide, light, and minerals that are needed by a plant for survival. Abiotic factors are non-living chemical and physical factors in the environment, which affect ecosystems. It explains such factors needed for the plant survival. 

The Carnivores is a biotic factor directly operating in an ecosystem. A carnivore meaning 'meat eater' is an organism that derives its energy and nutrient requirements from a diet consisting mainly or exclusively of animal tissue, whether through predation or scavenging. 

Every species plays an important role in maintaining an ecological balance among the living systems of the earth.

The biosphere encompasses all living organisms on Earth and the environments they inhabit. It extends from the deepest ocean trenches to the highest mountains where life exists. A biome is a major regional ecosystem type. A community is interacting species in a specific area. A population is organisms of the same species in an area.

The Global 200 is the list of ecoregions identified by WWF, the global conservation organization, as priorities for conservation.The WWF assigns a conservation status to each ecoregion in the Global 200, i.e. critical or endangered, vulnerable and relatively stable or intact. Over half of the ecoregions in the Global 200 are rated endangered.

The acronym HIPPO stands for habitat destruction, invasive species, pollution, human overpopulation and over-harvesting.

An ecoregion (ecological region) is an ecologically and geographically defined area that is smaller than a bioregion, which in turn is smaller than an ecozone. All three of these are larger than an ecosystem. Ecoregions cover relatively large areas of land or water, and contain characteristic, geographically distinct assemblages of natural communities and species. The biodiversity of flora, fauna and ecosystems that characterises an ecoregion tends to be distinct from that of other ecoregions.

Ecotopes are the smallest ecologically distinct landscape features in a landscape mapping and classification system. As such, they represent relatively homogeneous, spatially explicit landscape functional units that are useful for stratifying landscapes into ecologically distinct features for the measurement and mapping of landscape structure, function and change. In ecology, a niche is a term describing the way of life of a species. Each species is thought to have a separate, unique niche. The ecological niche describes how an organism or population responds to the distribution of resources and competitors.

An ecosystem includes both living (biotic) organisms and non-living (abiotic) physical conditions like soil, water, and climate. The interaction between these components defines an ecosystem.

The biosphere is the term for the global ecosystem - it encompasses all living organisms and their relationships with each other and with the physical environment across the entire Earth.

A biome is a large geographical region characterized by its distinctive climate (temperature, precipitation) and the specific plant and animal communities (biota) that have adapted to those conditions.