Ecology (from Greek: οἶκος, “house”; -λογία, “study of”) is the scientific study of the relationship between living organisms and their surroundings. Ecosystems are defined by a web, community, or network of individuals that arrange into a self-organized and complex hierarchy of patterns and processes.
Ecosystems create a biophysical feedback between living (biotic) and nonliving (abiotic) components of an environment, which generates and regulates the biogeochemical cycles of the planet.
Ecosystems provide goods and services that sustain human societies and general well-being. They are sustained by biodiversity within them.
Biodiversity encompasses the full scale of life and its processes, including genes, species, and ecosystems that form lineages integrating into a complex and regenerative spatial arrangement of types, forms, and interactions.
Ecology is a sub-discipline of biology, the study of life. The word “ecology” (“oekologie”) was coined in 1866 by the German scientist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919).
Haeckel was a zoologist, artist, writer, and later in life, a professor of comparative anatomy. Ancient Greek philosophers, including Hippocrates and Aristotle, were among the earliest to record notes and observations on the natural history of plants and animals, laying the early foundation for modern ecology.
Modern ecology emerged from natural history, a science that flourished in the late 19th century. Charles Darwin’s evolutionary treatise and the concept of adaptation, introduced in 1859, became a pivotal cornerstone in modern ecological theory.
Ecology is not synonymous with environment, environmentalism, natural history, or environmental science. Ecology is closely related to the biological disciplines of physiology, evolution, genetics, and behavior.
Understanding how biodiversity affects ecological function is an important focus area in ecological studies. Ecosystems sustain every life-supporting function on the planet, including climate regulation, water filtration, soil formation (pedogenesis), food, fibers, medicines, erosion control, and many other natural features of historical, spiritual, or scientific value. Ecologists seek to explain:
i. Life processes and adaptations
Distribution and abundance of organisms
ii. Movement of materials and energy through living communities
iii. Successional development of ecosystems
iv. Abundance and distribution of biodiversity in the context of the environment
There are many practical applications of ecology in conservation biology, wetland management, natural resource management (agriculture, forestry, fisheries), city planning (urban ecology), community health, economics, and it provides a conceptual framework for understanding and researching human social interaction (human ecology).
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Historical Background of Ecology in Agricultural and Environmental Science
Studies of animal distribution began in the nineteenth century, but the formal development of animal ecology did not occur until the 1920s. British zoologist Charles Elton, whose field research emphasized the study of populations in the wild, was perhaps the most influential figure.
Elton’s work, often involving northern fur-bearing animals of commercial value, introduced a number of concepts that became part of the naturalist’s vocabulary, including the ecological niche, the food chain, and the pyramid of numbers.
The pyramid of numbers illustrates the decrease in numbers of individual organisms, or the total quantity (weight) of organisms, at each successive stage in a food chain, from plants and plant-eating animals at the bottom to large carnivores at the top.
Similar to plant ecology, diverse schools of animal ecology emerged in Europe and the United States during the first half of the twentieth century.
Some schools, like Elton’s, focused on empirical studies of predator-prey interactions and population fluctuations, while others focused on animal community organization and broader patterns of distribution and abundance.
Although some early work in animal ecology, particularly in the United States, attempted to model itself on plant ecology, by the 1930s, animal ecology had emerged as an independent field. There was little overlap or interaction between the work of animal and plant ecologists.
An integrated perspective in ecology gained effective momentum from work in aquatic biology, best exemplified in the late nineteenth century by Karl Möbius’s studies of the depleted oyster bank off Germany’s north coast and the pioneering limnological (freshwater) studies of François Alphonse Forel on Swiss lakes.
This work was continued and refined in the early twentieth century by many researchers, including August Thienemann in Germany and Einar Naumann in Sweden.
Möbius’s concept of “biocenosis,” the integrated community consisting of all living beings associated with a given habitat or a particular set of environmental conditions, was widely adopted by German and Russian ecologists in the 1920s and 1930s.
An integrative perspective also emerged in soil science, as seen in Sergei Winogradsky’s turn-of-the-century studies of soil microbiology, and in studies of biogeochemical cycles, such as the work of Russian geochemist Vladímir Vernadsky, who introduced the term “biosphere” in 1914.
The concept that had the broadest appeal and played a central role in unifying various strands of ecological science was the “ecosystem,” introduced by British botanist Arthur G. Tansley in 1935, though it was first used effectively in an aquatic setting.
Tansley, Britain’s foremost plant ecologist, and the founder of the British Ecological Society in 1913, brought his broad experience to the problem of identifying the ideal ecological unit of study. He suggested that the term “ecosystem” captured this concept best without implying any mysterious vital properties.
The new term received its fullest early treatment in a seminal paper published in 1942 by a young American limnologist, Raymond Lindeman. Using the concept of ecological succession, Elton’s pyramid of numbers, food chains, earlier studies of energy flow in aquatic systems, and Clements’s notion of the stable climax community.
Lindeman traced the flow of energy through the different trophic (feeding) levels (producers, primary consumers, secondary consumers) in a small Minnesota pond to map its structure as an ecosystem and demonstrate its progress toward a stable, equilibrium state.
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Post-War Evolution of Ecological Theory and Practice
World War II marked a turning point for ecology. Although earlier preoccupations with community classification and structure, population dynamics, and patterns of distribution continued in the postwar years, newer methodologies, practices, and conceptual schemes took hold. Ecology as a science and profession grew in size, status, and organization.
In the postwar period, Lindeman’s groundbreaking work on ecosystem ecology found a home among biologists funded by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, who used radionuclides to trace the flow of materials and energy through natural ecosystems.
Ecosystem research soon expanded from its base in the Atomic Energy Commission and prospered among a small group of Tansley’s followers at the new Nature Conservancy in Britain.
It became an essential feature of modern ecological science, a message conveyed to several generations of students worldwide through the successive editions of Eugene P. Odum’s Introduction to Ecology, first published in 1953.
The postwar years also saw a shift toward the quantitative aspects of ecology. Mathematical techniques developed in the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union during the interwar period merged with war-born techniques involving information systems and cybernetics to produce a movement toward mathematical modeling and computer simulation of populations, communities, and ecosystems.
Much of this modeling and its techniques were later criticized during the last decades of the twentieth century. Some ecologists abandoned model building for empirical studies, while others worked to refine and improve the models. Many ecologists questioned the underlying notions of stability and equilibrium upon which most of the models were based.
The devastation caused by World War II contributed to a greater post-war interest in the conservation of natural resources, protection of wildlife, and preservation of natural environments. This trend, when linked in the 1960s with social criticism, blossomed into an international environmental movement that heavily drew upon ecological concepts and theories.
Ecology was now widely viewed not only as the source of remedies for environmental issues but also as the scientific underpinning for a new social order. This shift proved to be a mixed blessing for ecologists.
On one hand, funding for ecological research increased considerably, and more people were drawn into the field. On the other hand, the theoretical framework of ecological science, being neither unified nor consistent, could not provide easy, unambiguous solutions to environmental problems, nor could it offer unified and consistent social visions.
By the end of the twentieth century, this uncertainty among ecologists was used in debates against the protection of endangered species and the maintenance of pristine nature reserves.
This situation encouraged the further refinement and integration of ecological science to incorporate human disturbance and the notion of managed ecosystems.
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