For example, a village may be an ecosystem. The living things in this environment are people, animals like pigs and carabao, and plants like rice and vegetables. The non-living things in this environment are the houses, the land, or soil, and rainwater that comes during rainy season. People that live in the village take care of their pigs so that they have food to eat. They also take care of their carabao to help them plow their fields, water and weed their gardens.
People also depend on rain to water their fields.
In this set up, the vegetables, pigs and rice fields provide people food.to eat. In a village environment, the living and non-living things are interdependent on one another. When we look at the relationships between the animals, land, plants, rainwater and people in a village ecosystem we have briefly looked at the ecology of a village, or simply the village ecology . An ecosystem can also be a rainforest, a river, or an ocean. The study of relationships of the living and non living things in these environments is the study of the rainforest ecology, river ecology, and ocean ecology.