Final answer:
The term 'ecological community' is best defined by the phrase 'associations of species that live in the same area'.
Step-by-step explanation:
The term best defined by the phrase "associations of species that live in the same area" is A. ecological community. An ecological community is a group of interacting populations of different species that inhabit the same geographic area at the same time.
Populations within a community influence each other's abundance, distribution, and can form various relationships such as predation, competition, and symbiosis. The species richness and relative species abundance are measures of the biodiversity within these communities.