noun, plural: communities
In sociology, a community may refer to a locality inhabited by a group of humans of any size whose members use a common language, manners, law, culture and tradition or a social group sharing common characteristics or interests, sometimes regardless of their location. However, in ecology, a community does not only focus at human population. It particularly refers to an association of living organisms having mutual relationships among themselves and to their environment and thus functioning, at least to some degree, as an ecological unit.
In ecology, a community is comprised of the different groups of organisms coexisting in a habitat over a particular time. The ecological community is also called biocenosis. The term is coined in 1877 by Karl Möbius, a German zoologist and ecologist. The organisms living in a community interact with one another, often, affecting each other’s abundance, distribution, adaptation, and existence. An ecological community may range in size from the very small community as in a pond or a tree to the huge regional or global community as in a biome.
- biocenosis or biocoenosis (ecology)