Ecology is the natural science of the relationships among living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level. Ecology overlaps with the closely related sciences of biogeography, evolutionary biology, genetics, ethology, and natural history.
The metabolic theory of ecology (MTE) is the ecological component of the more general Metabolic Scaling Theory and Kleiber's law. It posits that the metabolic rate of organisms is the fundamental biological rate that governs most observed patterns in ecology. MTE is part of a larger set of theory known as metabolic scaling theory that attempts to provide a unified theory for the importance of metabolism in driving pattern and process in biology from the level of cells all the way to the biosphere.
James Hemphill Brown is an American biologist and academic.
Kleiber's law, named after Max Kleiber for his biology work in the early 1930s, is the observation that, for the vast majority of animals, an animal's metabolic rate scales to the 3⁄4 power of the animal's mass. More recently, Kleiber's law has also been shown to apply in plants, suggesting that Kleiber's observation is much more general. Symbolically: if B is the animal's metabolic rate, and M is the animal's mass, then Kleiber's law states that B~M3/4. Thus, over the same time span, a cat having a mass 100 times that of a mouse will consume only about 32 times the energy the mouse uses.
Ecology is a new science and considered as an important branch of biological science, having only become prominent during the second half of the 20th century. Ecological thought is derivative of established currents in philosophy, particularly from ethics and politics.
Allometry is the study of the relationship of body size to shape, anatomy, physiology and behaviour, first outlined by Otto Snell in 1892, by D'Arcy Thompson in 1917 in On Growth and Form and by Julian Huxley in 1932.
Ecological restoration is the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed. It is distinct from conservation in that it attempts to retroactively repair already damaged ecosystems rather than take preventative measures. Ecological restoration can reverse biodiversity loss, combat climate change, and support local economies. The United Nations named 2021-2030 the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.
Functional ecology is a branch of ecology that focuses on the roles, or functions, that species play in the community or ecosystem in which they occur. In this approach, physiological, anatomical, and life history characteristics of the species are emphasized. The term "function" is used to emphasize certain physiological processes rather than discrete properties, describe an organism's role in a trophic system, or illustrate the effects of natural selective processes on an organism. This sub-discipline of ecology represents the crossroads between ecological patterns and the processes and mechanisms that underlie them. It focuses on traits represented in large number of species and can be measured in two ways – the first being screening, which involves measuring a trait across a number of species, and the second being empiricism, which provides quantitative relationships for the traits measured in screening. Functional ecology often emphasizes an integrative approach, using organism traits and activities to understand community dynamics and ecosystem processes, particularly in response to the rapid global changes occurring in earth's environment.
The dynamic energy budget (DEB) theory is a formal metabolic theory which provides a single quantitative framework to dynamically describe the aspects of metabolism of all living organisms at the individual level, based on assumptions about energy uptake, storage, and utilization of various substances. The DEB theory adheres to stringent thermodynamic principles, is motivated by universally observed patterns, is non-species specific, and links different levels of biological organization as prescribed by the implications of energetics. Models based on the DEB theory have been successfully applied to over a 1000 species with real-life applications ranging from conservation, aquaculture, general ecology, and ecotoxicology. The theory is contributing to the theoretical underpinning of the emerging field of metabolic ecology.
Geoffrey Brian West is a British theoretical physicist and former president and distinguished professor of the Santa Fe Institute. He is one of the leading scientists working on a scientific model of cities. Among other things, his work states that with the doubling of a city's population, salaries per capita will generally increase by 15%.
Evolutionary physiology is the study of the biological evolution of physiological structures and processes; that is, the manner in which the functional characteristics of individuals in a population of organisms have responded to natural selection across multiple generations during the history of the population. It is a sub-discipline of both physiology and evolutionary biology. Practitioners in the field come from a variety of backgrounds, including physiology, evolutionary biology, ecology, and genetics.
Aaron M. Ellison is an American ecologist, photographer, sculptor, and writer. He retired in July 2021 after 20 years as the senior research fellow in ecology at Harvard University and as a Senior Ecologist at the Harvard Forest. He also served as deputy director of the Harvard Forest from 2018 to 2021. Until 2018, he also was an adjunct research professor at the University of Massachusetts in the Departments of Biology and Environmental Conservation. Ellison has both authored and co-authored numerous scientific papers, books, book reviews and software reviews. For more than 30 years, Ellison has studied food-web dynamics and community ecology of wetlands and forests; the evolutionary ecology of carnivorous plants; the responses of plants and ants to global climate change; application of Bayesian statistical inference to ecological research and environmental decision-making; and the critical reaction of Ecology to Modernism. In 2012 he was elected a fellow of the Ecological Society of America. He was the editor-in-chief of Ecological Monographs from 2008 to 2015, was a senior editor of Methods in Ecology and Evolution from 2018-2021, and since 2021 has been the executive editor of Methods in Ecology and Evolution.
Nancy B. Grimm is an American ecosystem ecologist and professor at Arizona State University. Grimm's substantial contributions to the understanding of urban and arid ecosystem biogeochemistry are recognized in her numerous awards. Grimm is an elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, Ecological Society of America, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Erika S. Zavaleta is an American professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Zavaleta is recognized for her research focusing on topics including plant community ecology, conservation practices for terrestrial ecosystems, and impacts of community dynamics on ecosystem functions.
Sandra Myrna Díaz ForMemRS is an Argentine ecologist and professor of ecology at the National University of Córdoba. She studies the functional traits of plants and investigates how plants impact the ecosystem.
Susan Patricia Harrison is a professor of ecology at the University of California, Davis who works on the dynamics of natural populations and ecological diversity. She is a fellow of the Ecological Society of America and the California Academy of Sciences. She has previously served as vice president of the American Society of Naturalists. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018.
Jeannine Cavender-Bares is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Ecology, Evolution & Behavior. Her research integrates evolutionary biology, ecology, and physiology by studying the functional traits of plants, with a particular focus on oaks.
Priyanga Amarasekare is a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and distinguished Fellow of the Ecological Society of America (ESA). Her research is in the fields of mathematical biology and trophic ecology, with a focus on understanding patterns of biodiversity, species dispersal and the impacts of climate change. She received a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship and received ESA's Robert H. MacArthur Award in 2022.
Tadashi Fukami is an associate Professor of Biology and community ecologist at Stanford University. He is currently the head of Fukami Lab which is a community ecology research group that focuses on "historical contingency in the assembly of ecological communities." Fukami is an elected Fellow of the Ecological Society of America.
Mark Westoby is an Australian evolutionary ecologist, emeritus professor at Macquarie University, and a specialist in trait ecology.
