Ecosystems

Think about this: An ecosystem is an interconnected zone where life exists.  It includes the air, the water, the soil, the animals, the plants, and the bacteria in that zone.  The entire Amazon rain forest could be an ecosystem, but so could life cradled in the water trapped in a single leaf high in the canopy of the rainforest.

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Another way to say this is that an ecosystem is a community of living things and their nonliving environment and may be as large as a desert or as small as a puddle. An ecosystem must contain producers, consumers, decomposers, and dead and inorganic matter.