Biocoenosis

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Biocoenosis" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (January 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (July 2015) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the German article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 2,026 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Biozönose]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Biozönose}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

A biocenosis (UK English, biocoenosis, also biocenose, biocoenose, biotic community, biological community, ecological community, life assemblage), coined by Karl Möbius in 1877, describes the interacting organisms living together in a habitat (biotope).^[1] The use of this term has declined in the 21st сentury.

In the palaeontological literature, the term distinguishes "life assemblages", which reflect the original living community, living together at one place and time. In other words, it is an assemblage of fossils or a community of specific time, which is different from "death assemblages" (thanatocoenoses).^[2] No palaeontological assemblage will ever completely represent the original biological community (i.e. the biocoenosis, in the sense used by an ecologist); the term thus has somewhat different meanings in a palaeontological and an ecological context.^[2]

Based on the concept of biocenosis, ecological communities can take various forms:

• Zoocenosis for the faunal community,
• Phytocenosis for the flora community,
• Microbiocenosis for the microbial community.

The geographical extent of a biocenose is limited by the requirement of a more or less uniform species composition.