What is Ecosystem?

What is Ecosystem?

Ecosystem is a community of living organisms along with their natural habitat and the non-living components of their environment. This network of living and non-living components in given area is known as an Ecosystem. And ecosystem could be a pond, could be your house as well. And some believe that our Earth is an ecosystem too!

Ecosystem includes two major components:
• Biotic components
• Abiotic components

Abiotic components are the non-living elements of the system such as air, water, sunlight, nutrients and temperature. Biotic components are all living organism living in the system like plants, fungi, micro-organisms and even humans!

Ecosystem can be of any size. The area under your pot, under the rock, a pond, a puddle, the vast ocean and the city in we live or the country!

Area under a rock, we can find micro-organisms like insects and abiotic components like soil, nutrients, air etc. Each organism living in an ecosystem has a role or Niche. Example: A deer living is a prey. Lions, Tigers, Coyotes and other animals eat them for food. Imagine if a deer was supposed to eat lions, coyotes and wolves? Wouldn’t that make things difficult for an ecosystem? Remember that no organisms can have the same niche for too long. After a while one has to either leave or go extinct.

Did you know, that you are even an ecosystem? You are an ecosystem to the thousands of microorganisms that inhabit in you! Also, our ecosystem is really important. If we keep polluting our ecosystem like that we would soon go extinct and the Earth wouldn’t be habitable ecosystem ever!