The various components (temperature, amount of sunlight, availability of food, etc.) of an ecosystem change slightly from day to day, season to season, and year to year. Organisms, communities, and the ecosystem as a whole are usually able to respond to these slight changes as you learned in lesson 5 of this lesson. But what happens when the change is so large that the organisms, communities and the ecosystem as a whole are not able to respond to the changes?

Watch the video below.

Just as one domino can knock down the next, one change in the environment can cause another thing to change. Changes in the environment can be natural occurrences such as flooding or human caused such as clear cutting a forest.