🧫 Build the Biodome

Ecosystem design challenge

Your biodome needs more than attractive species. A living ecosystem needs producers to capture energy, consumers to move energy through the food web, decomposers to recycle nutrients, and buffer species or habitats to stabilise water, temperature and shelter.

Producers

Plants, algae and other photosynthetic life form the energy base of the ecosystem.

Consumers

Herbivores, omnivores and predators transfer energy and keep populations balanced.

Decomposers

Fungi, bacteria and detritivores break down waste and return nutrients to soil or water.

Buffers

Habitat features such as moss, leaf litter, mud flats and shade reduce environmental stress.

Choose Your Biome

Biome briefing

Choose a biome to see its climate pressures, key ecosystem services and design challenge.

Select Species

Design Your Ecosystem

Ecosystem dashboard

0Biodiversity score
0Resilience score
0Food-web balance
0Species placed

Select a biome and place species to start building your biodome.

Food Web: Incomplete
Water Balance: Stable
Temperature: Normal

Biodome learning glossary

Food web

A network of feeding relationships that shows how energy moves between organisms.

Keystone species

A species with an unusually large effect on ecosystem stability, such as top predators or habitat-builders.

Nutrient cycle

The movement of nutrients from living organisms to soil or water and back into living things.

Resilience

An ecosystem’s ability to cope with shocks such as drought, heat, disease or population change.