BIOTIC AND ABIOTIC COMPONENTS Biotic components are the living things that shape an ecosystem.

A biotic factor is any living component that affects another organism, including animals that consume the organism in question, and the living food that the organism consumes. Each biotic factor needs energy to do work and food for proper growth. Biotic factors include human influence. Biotic components are contrasted to abiotic components, which are non-living components of an organism's environment, such as temperature, light, moisture, air currents, etc. Remember the abiotic factors by SWATS. Soil, Water, Air, Temperature, and Sunlight. Biotic components usually include:

Producers, i.e. autotrophs: e.g. plants, they convert the energy [from photosynthesis (the transfer of sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into energy), or other sources such as hydrothermal vents] into food. Consumers, i.e. heterotrophs: e.g. animals, they depend upon producers (occasionally other consumers) for food. Decomposers, i.e. detritivores: e.g. fungi and bacteria, they break down chemicals from producers and consumers (usually dead) into simpler form which can be reused. In ecology and biology, abiotic components (also called abiotic factors) are nonliving chemical and physical factors in the environment, which affect ecosystems. Abiotic phenomena underlie all of biology. In biology, abiotic factors can be include light, radiation, temperature, water, atmospheric gases, and soil. The macroscopic climate often influences each of the above. Pressure and sound waves may also be considered in the context of marine or sub-terrestrial environments.[1] All of these factors affect different organisms to different extents. If there is little or no sunlight then plants may wither and die from not being able to get enough sunlight to do photosynthesis. Many archaea require very high temperatures, or pressures, or unusual concentrations of chemical substances such as sulfur, because of their specialization into extreme conditions. Certain fungi have evolved to survive mostly at the temperature, the humidity, and stability of their environment.[2] For example, there is a significant difference in access to water as well as humidity between temperate rainforests and deserts. This difference in water access causes a diversity in the types of plants and animals that grow in these areas.

FOOD CHAIN
A food chain is a linear consequence of links in a food web starting from a species that eats no other species in the web and ends at a species that is eaten by no other species in the web. A food chain differs from a food web, because the complex polyphagous network of feeding relations are aggregated into trophic species and the chain only follows linear monophagous pathways. A common metric used to quantify food web trophic structure is food chain length. In its simplest form, the length of a chain is the number of links between a trophic consumer and the base of the web and the mean chain length of an entire web is the arithmetic average of the lengths of all chains in a food [1][2] web. Food chains were first introduced by the African-Arab scientist and philosopher Al-Jahiz in the 9th century and later popularized in a book published in 1927 by Charles Elton, which also introduced the food web concept

FOOD WEB
A series of organisms related by predator-prey and consumer-resource interactions; the entirety of interrelated food chains in an ecological community. In nature, food chain relationships are not isolated. They are very complex, as one organism may form the food source of many organisms. Thus, instead of a simple linear food chain, there is a web like structure formed by these interlinked food chains. Such interconnected matrix of food chains is called 'food web'. Food web can be defined as, "a network of food chains which are interconnected at various trophic levels, so as to form a number of feeding connections amongst different organisms of a biotic community". Food webs are indispensable in ecosystems as they allow an organism to obtain its food from more than one type of organism of the lower trophic level.