Biosphere 2 was meant as a self-sustaining ecosystem capable of supporting human life. It wasn't entirely successful, but was along the lines of what you described.
Biosphere was an interesting experiment, but very different from what I had in mind. It relied on a huge up-front engineering effort, orders of magnitude more than what would be realistic on Mars. What I had in mind was a colonization effort in the desert starting with what you could realistically carry on a spacecraft, i.e. a few shipping containers (even that is being pretty generous) and then no outside contact for two years (at a minimum).