0:12 → 0:17
In this video we are going to look at a few key words that you will come across through Ecology.
0:18 → 0:21
Let's start by looking at the whole thing: The Ecosystem
0:22 → 0:29
An ecosystem is made up of all the communities that live in it, every single organism, from big to small, and lots of environmental factors,
0:29 → 0:33
like sunlight, shade, the woodland, streams and other things.
0:34 → 0:40
An ecosystem is defined as a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment.
0:40 → 0:46
A habitat is an area or environment in which an organism naturally lives, so the woodland in this example.
0:46 → 0:55
It describes the geographical area occupied by the ecosystem, whereas the ecosystem is the interactions between everything living within it, as well as the nonliving factors.
0:56 → 1:01
Populations are all members of the same species in the habitat at one time.
1:01 → 1:09
While populations describe just one species, a community is all the organisms in multiple species that coexist in the habitat at one time.
1:09 → 1:16
So the community is the foxes, rabbits, insects, plants, fungi and everything else living in the woodland.
1:16 → 1:20
A niche describes the role of the species within an ecosystem.
1:20 → 1:23
So, a bee's role is to pollinate the flowers.
1:23 → 1:32
The rabbits role, or niche, is to be a small grazing prey animal with a very high reproduction rate, which supports many predators in the ecosystem.
1:32 → 1:40
A species is a group of potentially interbreeding individuals, which do not normally reproduce with other species to produce viable fertile offspring.
1:40 → 1:45
So here, in our woodland, we have foxes and rabbits, that are clearly different species.
1:46 → 1:49
But we may also have a few different species of butterfly.
1:49 → 1:55
Maybe one lives on the outside of the woods and likes light while another lives deeper in the wood.
1:56 → 2:00
And because they prefer different areas of the wood they don't interbreed.
2:00 → 2:08
We will look at what it really means to be a species in another video, and we'll also revisit all the words throughout ecology.
2:08 → 2:18
For now you just need to know the difference between a habitat and ecosystem, a population and a community and how species have a niche within the ecosystem.