Ecosystems are communities of living things that interact with each other and their physical environment. Check out our Regional Policy Statement definition.
Organisms together with their abiotic environment, forming an interacting system, inhabiting an identifiable space.
(Greek, oikos, house + systema, that which is put together) a major interacting system involving both organisms and their physical environment
systems formed from the interactions between communities and their physical environments.
An ecological community together with its environment, functioning as a unit.
populations of living organisms that interact with each other as well as with their abiotic or physical environment (A cranberry bog is an ecosystem that is unique tot he New Jersey Pinelands.)
Dynamic assemblages of native plant and/or animal communities that occur together on the landscape or in the water; and are tied together by similar ecological processes (e.g., fire, hydrology), underlying environmental features (e.g., soils, geology) or environmental gradients (e.g., elevation).
a natural unit comprised of living organisms and their interactions with their environment, including the circulation, transformation, and accumulation of energy and matter.
a community of living things and their relationships to their surroundings.
Any complex of living organisms together with all the other biotic and abiotic (non-living) factors which affect them.
are systems in which organisms interact with each other and with their environment. There are two parts; the entire complex of organisms (biome) living in harmony and the habitat in which the biome exists.
are a community of plants, animals, and micro-organisms that are linked by energy and nutrient flows and that interact with each other and with the physical environment. Rainforests, deserts, coral reefs, grasslands, and a rotting log are all examples of ecosystems.4
a spatially explicit, relatively homogeneous unit of the earth that includes all interacting organisms and components of the abiotic environment within its boundaries.
An ecosystem is an area, which can be given a physical boundary for convenient ecological study. Ecosystems can be defined in three ways. as places which can be recognized within their general surroundings, such as "Sibuyan Island and its In-shore Waters:; as places which are defined by the predominance of one plant species, such as the Pine forests (Pinus merkusi) of the central Mindoro massif; as places which are defined by the territory of one animal species, such as the Tamaraw grasslands of Mt. Iglit. But ecosystems can be sub-divided again and again so that, for instance, within the Ecosystem of a forest, one can define a sub-Ecosystems according to soils and drainage, and so on to the sub-Ecosystems of individual trees or even of individual leaves. As with the landscapes they describe, Ecosystems change. They are the dynamic workshops where plants and animal species co-evolve.
Systems which include both living and non-living substances interacting to produce an exchange of materials between the living and the non living units
(écosystèmes) Biological communities of interacting organisms and their physical environment.