Ecosystem Fundamentals
📌 An ecosystem is the interaction system between living biotic factors and non-living abiotic factors, where both components mutually influence each other.
🌲 Ecosystems are categorized as natural (formed without human intervention, high biodiversity, e.g., forests, lakes) or artificial (formed due to human intervention, low biodiversity, e.g., rice fields, dams).
🔄 Living components interact both with the abiotic environment (e.g., plants affecting soil) and other biotic components (competition, predation, symbiosis).

Roles of Living Organisms in Ecosystems
🌿 Producers are autotrophs (like green plants, algae) that generate their own food via photosynthesis, occupying the first trophic level.
🐛 Consumers are categorized as primary (herbivores), secondary (carnivores eating primary consumers), and tertiary (apex predators, like eagles preying on snakes).
🍄 Detritivores (e.g., earthworms, certain insects) consume detritus like dead leaves and animal carcasses, while Decomposers (bacteria and fungi) break down dead organic matter into simple inorganic substances.

Interactions and Energy Flow
🤝 Biotic interactions include competition (e.g., lions and tigers vying for deer), predation (e.g., cats eating fish), and symbiosis (mutualism, commensalism, parasitism, amensalism).
🐍 Energy flows through food chains and food webs, moving from producers up through various consumer levels.
📉 Only about 10% of energy is successfully transferred as biomass from one trophic level to the next, a concept known as ecological efficiency.

Productivity and Cycling
🌱 Ecosystem productivity measures the ability of living things to capture and store energy, divided into primary productivity (autotrophs converting sunlight to chemical energy) and secondary productivity (heterotrophs converting consumed energy).
💧 The continuous exchange of matter between biotic and abiotic components results in biogeochemical cycles (including nitrogen, water, oxygen, carbon, sulfur, and phosphorus cycles), ensuring materials are constantly recycled.

Key Points & Insights
➡️ Ecosystem stability relies on the continuous interaction between biotic components (producers, consumers, decomposers) and abiotic factors.
➡️ Understand the 10% energy transfer rule to grasp the limitation of biomass transfer across successive trophic levels in any food chain.
➡️ Biogeochemical cycles are crucial as they ensure that essential materials are never lost from the ecosystem but are continually recycled back to the biotic components.

📸 Video summarized with SummaryTube.com on Jan 11, 2026, 03:15 UTC