Ecosystem

Coined in 1935, the term ecosystem did not appear in titles of scientific papers until the 1940s, and was not listed in the indexing system of Biological Abstracts until 1957. Use of the term in the scientific literature did not attain wide prominence until the 1970s. The term ecosystem originated with English ecologist Arthur Tansley (1871–1955) in the paper: “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms,” published in Ecology in 1935. Tansley's basic notion was that of a system that combined living organisms, the biome, with the physical environment. What was novel about the term to ecologists was the incorporation of the physical environment as part of the unit of study. Ecology had so far been confined to departments of biology in the ...