Where a living thing lives: A habitat is the location in which a community, species, population or organism lives.
The points to remember
- A habitat is the location where a community, species, population or organism lives.
- Describe its geographical location: where on Earth (a country, an island, a lake).
- Describe its physical location: where exactly it lives there (a burrow, a canal bottom, a treetop).
- Name the type of ecosystem it needs (sea cliffs, freshwater wetland, cloud forest).
- Say the conditions that ecosystem must give it to survive: food, water, temperature, shelter.
Remember it as: Where on Earth, where exactly, which ecosystem, what it needs.
Write 'habitat', not 'home': 'Home' is not accepted as the scientific word. Use habitat, and say what it provides.
Real example: puffins breed only where there is soft soil for burrows and no rats, such as Skomer, and feed in a sea full of sand eels.
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Habitat and niche are easy to mix up. Keep them apart with one question each.
Habitat or niche?
- Habitat = where a species lives.
- Niche = how it lives there: everything it needs and all its interactions (2.1.8).
- Many species can share one habitat; each species has its own niche.
Habitat
- Where it lives
- Can be shared by many species
Niche
- How it lives there
- Belongs to one species
Real example: puffins, razorbills and guillemots share the same sea-cliff habitat on Skomer, but puffins nest in burrows while guillemots lay their eggs on bare rock ledges.
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Habitats in a local ecosystem: Even a small wood or shore contains many habitats, each with its own conditions and species.
The points to remember
- A local ecosystem holds many small habitats close together.
- Each small habitat has its own conditions: light, water, temperature, shelter.
- So each one holds different species, which you can find by searching it.
A local habitat: in a school wood, woodlice live under rotting logs. It is dark and damp there, so they do not dry out, and the rotting wood is their food.
Try it: Pick one species near you and describe its habitat in four parts: where on Earth, where exactly, which ecosystem, what it needs.
How this comes up: Paper 2, Section B (a) [4]: outline a habitat, four points for a named species. Or Paper 1 [1] or [2] from a fact file.
A local wildlife group is making a leaflet about seabirds on the Welsh coast.
Outline the habitat of a named species.
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