Noun

(en noun)

A system formed by an ecological community and its environment that functions as a unit.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2012-01

, author=Donald Worster , title=A Drier and Hotter Future , volume=100, issue=1, page=70 , magazine= citation , passage=Phoenix and Lubbock are both caught in severe drought, and it is going to get much worse. We may see many such [dust] storms in the decades ahead, along with species extinctions, radical disturbance of ecosystems , and intensified social conflict over land and water. Welcome to the Anthropocene, the epoch when humans have become a major geological and climatic force.}}

The interconnectedness of organisms (plants, animals, microbes) with each other and their environment.

(business, marketing) A set of interconnected products and services.

Noun

(en noun)

The surroundings of, and influences on, a particular item of interest.

The natural world or ecosystem.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-07, author=David Simpson

, volume=188, issue=26, page=36, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly) , title= Fantasy of navigation , passage=It is tempting to speculate about the incentives or compulsions that might explain why anyone would take to the skies in [the] basket [of a balloon]: […];  […]; or perhaps to muse on the irrelevance of the borders that separate nation states and keep people from understanding their shared environment .}}

All the elements over which a designer has no control and that affect a system or its inputs and outputs.

A particular political or social setting, arena or condition.

(computing) The software and/or hardware existing on any particular computer system.

(programming) The environment of a function at a point during the execution of a program is the set of identifiers in the function's scope and their bindings at that point.

(computing) The set of variables and their values in a namespace that an operating system associates with a process.