Level of life
Ecosystem
A community of living things together with its physical environment, linked by flows of energy and nutrients.
Biosphere
All of Earth's ecosystems together: every place on the planet where life exists.Source: OpenStax, 2018Source: Field et al., 1998
Level of life
How Biosphere connects
Biosphere is made of
Biosphere includes
Idea or model
Biodiversity
The variety of life, from genes to ecosystems. A 2019 global assessment found that around 1 million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction.
Idea or model
Ocean zones
The ocean is layered by depth. Only the upper 200 meters gets enough light for photosynthesis, and below 1,000 meters it is completely dark.
Studied in
Your progress
Sources & further reading
The explanations on this page are our own summaries of these sources. Follow a link to read the original; if anything here disagrees with it, the original wins. How we choose and check sources.
Biology 2e (opens the original in a new tab)
OpenStax (2018). OpenStax, Rice University.
Free introductory college textbook.
TextbookEducationalLicence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (linked, not reused)
Primary production of the biosphere: integrating terrestrial and oceanic components (opens the original in a new tab)
Field CB, Behrenfeld MJ, Randerson JT, et al. (1998). Science 281:237-240.
Global net primary production of about 105 petagrams of carbon per year, split roughly evenly between land and ocean.
Peer-reviewedPrimary research