What is the significance of the nitrogen cycle in ecosystems?

What is the significance of the nitrogen cycle in ecosystems?

Step 1: Understand that nitrogen is an essential nutrient for plants and animals.
Step 2: Recognize that nitrogen is found in the atmosphere, but plants cannot use it in that form.
Step 3: Learn that the nitrogen cycle is a process that converts nitrogen from the atmosphere into forms that plants can absorb.
Step 4: Identify the key processes in the nitrogen cycle: nitrogen fixation, nitrification, assimilation, ammonification, and denitrification.
Step 5: Realize that nitrogen fixation involves bacteria converting atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, which plants can use.
Step 6: Understand that nitrification is the process where ammonia is converted into nitrites and then nitrates, which are also usable by plants.
Step 7: Know that plants absorb nitrates and use them to grow and produce food.
Step 8: Learn that when plants and animals die, decomposers break them down, returning nitrogen to the soil in the form of ammonia (ammonification).
Step 9: Recognize that denitrification is the process where bacteria convert nitrates back into atmospheric nitrogen, completing the cycle.

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