What Is a Biotic Habitat?

What Are Habitats?

• While the term "habitat" is often used as a generic term for a regional ecosystem, ecologists generally use it to describe the geographical range where an organism can thrive. Generally, a species is closely bound to its habitat because the species evolved to thrive in it, and may be dependent on several of the habitat's unique attributes. For example, an elephant is restricted to areas where it can eat roughly 10 times its own body mass every year in grassland vegetation.

Abiotic Factors of a Habitat

• The abiotic, or non-living, factors of an environment are those that largely exist independent of influence from living organisms. Abiotic factors of a shark's habitat, for example, would include the salinity, temperature and oxygen content of the ocean water where it hunts. The abiotic factors of a camel include low precipitation, high winds and exposure to sand.

Biotic Factors of a Habitat

• Biotic factors of a habitat draw from the influence that other living organisms have on the environment. There are several different types of biotic factors; the presence of some biotic factors may cause a species to thrive, while others may cause the environment to be inhospitable. Two examples of biotic factors are competition and predation. These influence a region's habitability for a species by the presence of other species that could pose a danger.

Symbiotic Relationships

• Not all biotic factors are defined by adversarial relationships. Many species depend on biotic factors wherein they share a mutually beneficial relationship, or symbiosis, with another species. A common example of a symbiotic relationship is between flowering plants and insects. Insects feed on a plant's nectar, and the plant benefits from this because the insect spreads pollen from the flower.

Biomes

• Another term used by ecologists is "biome," which has a similar meaning as "habitat," but does not describe local suitability for a particular species. Rather, biomes describe the entire community of organisms that all share a particular climate. The principal biomes are mountain and polar regions, tropical rainforests, grasslands, deserts, temperate forests, monsoon forests, deciduous forests, coniferous forests and evergreen shrub forests.