Ecology is the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystems, and biosphere level. Ecology overlaps with the closely related sciences of biogeography, evolutionary biology, genetics, ethology and natural history. Ecology is a branch of biology, and it is not synonymous with environmentalism.
In ecology, a niche is the match of a species to a specific environmental condition. It describes how an organism or population responds to the distribution of resources and competitors and how it in turn alters those same factors. "The type and number of variables comprising the dimensions of an environmental niche vary from one species to another [and] the relative importance of particular environmental variables for a species may vary according to the geographic and biotic contexts".
Human ecology is an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary study of the relationship between humans and their natural, social, and built environments. The philosophy and study of human ecology has a diffuse history with advancements in ecology, geography, sociology, psychology, anthropology, zoology, epidemiology, public health, and home economics, among others.
Agroecology is an applied science that studies ecological processes applied to agricultural production systems. Bringing ecological principles to bear can suggest new management approaches in agroecosystems. The term is often used imprecisely, as the term can be used as a science, a movement, or an agricultural practice. Agroecologists study a variety of agroecosystems. The field of agroecology is not associated with any one particular method of farming, whether it be organic, regenerative, integrated, or conventional, intensive or extensive, although some use the name specifically for alternative agriculture.
Howard Thomas Odum, usually cited as H. T. Odum, was an American ecologist. He is known for his pioneering work on ecosystem ecology, and for his provocative proposals for additional laws of thermodynamics, informed by his work on general systems theory.
Kelp forests are underwater areas with a high density of kelp, which covers a large part of the world's coastlines. Smaller areas of anchored kelp are called kelp beds. They are recognized as one of the most productive and dynamic ecosystems on Earth. Although algal kelp forest combined with coral reefs only cover 0.1% of Earth's total surface, they account for 0.9% of global primary productivity. Kelp forests occur worldwide throughout temperate and polar coastal oceans. In 2007, kelp forests were also discovered in tropical waters near Ecuador.
Charles Sutherland Elton was an English zoologist and animal ecologist. He is associated with the development of population and community ecology, including studies of invasive organisms.
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.
Restoration ecology is the scientific study supporting the practice of ecological restoration, which is the practice of renewing and restoring degraded, damaged, or destroyed ecosystems and habitats in the environment by active human interruption and action. Effective restoration requires an explicit goal or policy, preferably an unambiguous one that is articulated, accepted, and codified. Restoration goals reflect societal choices from among competing policy priorities, but extracting such goals is typically contentious and politically challenging.
The intermediate disturbance hypothesis (IDH) suggests that local species diversity is maximized when ecological disturbance is neither too rare nor too frequent. At low levels of disturbance, more competitive organisms will push subordinate species to extinction and dominate the ecosystem. At high levels of disturbance, due to frequent forest fires or human impacts like deforestation, all species are at risk of going extinct. According to IDH theory, at intermediate levels of disturbance, diversity is thus maximized because species that thrive at both early and late successional stages can coexist. IDH is a nonequilibrium model used to describe the relationship between disturbance and species diversity. IDH is based on the following premises: First, ecological disturbances have major effects on species richness within the area of disturbance. Second, interspecific competition results from one species driving a competitor to extinction and becoming dominant in the ecosystem. Third, moderate ecological scale disturbances prevent interspecific competition.
Daniel Simberloff is a biologist and ecologist who earned his PhD from Harvard University in 1969. He is currently Gore Hunger Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Tennessee, editor-in-chief of the journal Biological Invasions and a member of the National Academy of Sciences
George David Tilman, ForMemRS, is an American ecologist. He is Regents Professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in Ecology at the University of Minnesota, as well as an instructor in Conservation Biology; Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior; and Microbial Ecology. He is director of the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve long-term ecological research station. Tilman is also a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management.
(John) Philip Grime 30 April 1935 - 19 April 2021 was an ecologist and emeritus professor at the University of Sheffield. He is best known for his Universal adaptive strategy theory, for the unimodal relationship between species richness and site productivity, for the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis, for the DST classification and, with Simon Pierce, universal adaptive strategy theory (UAST) and the twin filter model of community assembly and eco-evolutionary dynamics.
Ecological traps are scenarios in which rapid environmental change leads organisms to prefer to settle in poor-quality habitats. The concept stems from the idea that organisms that are actively selecting habitat must rely on environmental cues to help them identify high-quality habitat. If either the habitat quality or the cue changes so that one does not reliably indicate the other, organisms may be lured into poor-quality habitat.
Richard J. Hobbs FAA, is a distinguished professor, ARC Australian Laureate Fellow and ecologist at the University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and a Highly-Cited author who has written extensively in the areas of vegetation dynamics and management, ecosystem fragmentation, ecosystem rehabilitation and restoration, landscape ecology, and conservation biology. Current research focuses on managing ecosystems in a rapidly changing world.
The Robert H. MacArthur Award is a biennial prize given by the Ecological Society of America to ecologists for their pivotal contributions to their field. The acceptance speeches of many recipients have been given at the annual meeting of the society and subsequently published in the ESA's Journal of Ecology.
John Thomas Curtis was an American botanist and plant ecologist. He is particularly known for his lasting contribution to the development of numerical methods in ecology. Together with J. Roger Bray, he developed the method of polar ordination with its inherent distance measure, the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity.
William J. Ripple is a professor of ecology at Oregon State University in the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society. He is best known for his research on terrestrial trophic cascades, particularly the role of the gray wolf in North America as an apex predator and a keystone species that shapes food webs and landscape structures via “top-down” pressures.
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, a specialist in trait ecology.
