Ecology

Ecology is a scientific discipline that focuses on the distribution and abundance of living organisms and how this distribution and abundance are affected by interactions between organisms and [Page 366]their environment. The term is derived from the Greek words oikos, meaning home, and logos, meaning study. Therefore, ecology might be described as the study of the home life of living organisms. The environment of an individual organism is composed of biotic factors, including other animals, plants, fungi, or microbes living in the same habitat, and abiotic (physical and chemical) factors, for example, local climatic or hydro-logic conditions.

Ecology is commonly considered a branch of biology, but it might be better characterized as a multidisciplinary science. Because it also focuses on the interactions between organisms and their abiotic environment, many other scientific disciplines that help to explore environmental relationships contribute to ecological knowledge, like anthropology, chemistry, climatology, geography, geology, and physics.

Regarding distribution and abundance of living organisms, ecology deals with three levels: the individual organism; the population, consisting of individuals of the same species; and the community, comprising all populations living in the same habitat. Additionally, ecologists study the pathways followed by energy and matter through the interacting biotic and abiotic components that compose the so-called ecosystem and the relationships across multiple ecosystems. According to these levels of examination, the subdisciplines of ecology are commonly classified into autecology (also called species ecology), population ecology, synecology (also called community ecology), ecosystem ecology, and landscape ecology. Nevertheless, ecology can also be subdivided according to other categories. Different kinds of this scientific discipline can be defined, for example, by organism of interest (e.g., plant ecology), by habitat (e.g., urban ecology), or by application (e.g., conservation ecology).

Although ecology as a scientific discipline does not dictate what is right or wrong, the term ecological is also used as a synonym for environmental concern; because of this, it has acquired a positive connotation regarding moral judgments about human action in the nonhuman natural world. This meaning, tending to mix up results of scientific research and ethical values, emerged with the transformation of the ecological movement in the 1960s. For an exact distinction between ecology as a pure scientific discipline and the ideas and goals of the political movement of nature preservation, it is helpful to speak of ecology and environ-mentalism. Nevertheless, both try to see nature as a whole, and they continue to influence one another. Ecological knowledge provides a scientific basis for expressing and evaluating the aims of the environmental movement. Ecologists themselves also respond to the call of the environmental movement in directing much of their research to the environmental problems that have become increasingly pressing.

The concept of time is an increasingly important theme within the field of ecology, including both the science and the political movement. Both have their own history of development, which at some points are intertwined. Further, the history of ecology shows that for a long time, nature was thought of as being inherently balanced, wherefore it was largely ignored that history as one conception of time is applicable to the ecosphere. Such ideas were increasingly questioned after World War II, and nowadays it has become widely accepted that the natural world changes continually through time and that ecological and evolutionary processes affect each other. On this basis, the discipline of evolutionary ecology started to develop in the 1950s. But time does not only play a role in ecology in its historical sense: All organisms are embedded within the cyclical structure of the natural world. Ignoring the timescales of natural cyclical processes, like the flux of energy and matter through ecosystems, is thought to be a causal factor in the present environmental crisis.

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