Abiotic factor: Non-living variable within the ecosystem, affecting the life of organisms. Examples include temperature, light, and water. Abiotic factors can be harmful to the environment, as when sulphur dioxide emissions from power stations produce acid rain.

Biotic factor: Biotic components are the living things that shape an ecosystem. They are in entirety, any living component that affects another organism. Such things include animals which consume the organism in question, and the living food that the organism consumes

Trophic levels are the feeding position in a food chain such as primary producers, herbivore, primary carnivore, etc.

Primary Producers: Primary producers are principally green plants and certain bacteria. They convert solar energy into organic energy.

The primary consumers: are also known as herbivores and include the tiny crustacean zooplankton that filter microscopic algal cells out of the surface waters of lakes, ponds, and oceans, as well as much larger, mammalian herbivores, such as mice, deer, cows, and elephants. Herbivores utilize the fixed energy and nutrients in their food to drive their own metabolic processes and to achieve their own growth.

Secondary Consumers: Organisms that feed from the primary consumers. If the herbivore must be killed before it is eaten, the secondary consumer is known as a predator. However, if the herbivore does not have to be killed to be eaten, the secondary consumer is known as a scavenger or a parasite.

Decomposers: utilize energy from wastes or dead organisms, and so complete the cycle by returning nutrients to the soil or water, and carbon dioxide to the air and water. See water cycle for more on water's role.

A simple representation of the trophic levels in the form of chain and the link between them.

Is a more complex and realistic way to show the flow of the energy though the ecosystem

A pyramid of numbers is a graphical representation of the numbers of individuals in each population in a food chain. Often it is drawn from the autotrophic level up. A pyramid of numbers can be used to examine how the population of a certain species affects another.

 

10

180

500

10000

A biomass pyramid has each tier symbolising the total dry weight of all organisms in an ecosystem's levels at any given time. Biomass represents chemical energy stored in the organic matter of a trophic level. Most narrow sharply from producers at the base to top-level carnivores at the top.

850 gr/m2

90 gr/m2

50 gr/m2

7 gr/m2

A pyramid of productivity has trophic levels stacked in blocks proportional in size to the energy acquired from the level below. Food chains are usually bottom heavy since only 10% of energy is transferred.

The second law of thermodynamics state that the energy in any system decreases. In this pyramid one can see that the amount of energy that is passed from one level to the other decreases.

The amount of energy that is available in each level decreases in 90% each time. That means that the amount of energy passed from one level to the other is only 10% of the energy available in the previous trophic level. This is because the all organisms use energy to preform their normal processes, and some more of the energy is lost during the consumption process (hunting, eating, unprocessed food, etc.)

Organisms of the same specie that live together in a place and interact with each other.

Organisms with similar characteristics that are able to reproduce fertile offspring.

It is a group of populations living together and interacting with each other. Son of the forms of interaction could be sharing the same food, places for shelter, water resources ….etc

The term niche is used to describe the role an organism or population plays within its community or ecosystem. Some examples of niche are predator, grazer, hunter-gatherer, scavenger, and parasite.