Level of life
Community
All the populations of different species living and interacting in one area.
Ecosystem
A community of living things together with its physical environment, linked by flows of energy and nutrients.Source: OpenStax, 2018
Level of life
How Ecosystem connects
Ecosystem is made of
Ecosystem makes up
Level of life
Biosphere
All of Earth's ecosystems together: every place on the planet where life exists.
Ecosystem includes
Idea or model
Food chains and webs
Who eats whom in an ecosystem. Energy and nutrients pass from producers to the animals that eat them.
Process
Pollination
Moving pollen between flowers, often by animals, so plants can make seeds.
Process
Mycorrhizae
Partnerships between plant roots and fungi. A 2018 review estimated that only about 8 percent of vascular plant species have none.
Ecosystem is related to
Process
Coral bleaching
When water is too warm, corals expel the algae living in their tissues and turn white. Record heat in 2015 and 2016 caused the third global bleaching event since the 1980s.
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)