Ecology

Last Updated on Tuesday, 9 February 2010 08:13 Written by beverlyhills Sunday, 11 October 2009 04:21

Ecology is a broad discipline comprising many sub-disciplines. A common, broad classification, moving from lowest to highest complexity, where complexity is defined as the number of entities and processes in the system under study, is:

• Ecophysiology examines how the physiological functions of organisms influence the way they interact with the environment, both biotic and abiotic.
• Ecomechanics uses physics and engineering principles to examine the interaction of organisms with their environment and with other species.
• Behavioral ecology examines the roles of behavior in enabling an animal to adapt to its environment.
• Population ecology studies the dynamics of populations of a single species.
• Community ecology (or synecology) focuses on the interactions between species within an ecological community.
• Ecosystem ecology studies the flows of energy and matter through the biotic and abiotic components of ecosystems.
• Systems ecology is an interdisciplinary field focusing on the study, development, and organization of ecological systems from a holistic perspective.
• Landscape ecology examines processes and relationship in a spatially explicit manner, often across multiple ecosystems or very large geographic areas.
• Evolutionary ecology studies ecology in a way that explicitly considers the evolutionary histories of species and their interactions.
• Political ecology connects politics and economy to problems of environmental control and ecological change.

Ecology can also be sub-divided according to the species of interest into fields such as animal ecology, plant ecology, insect ecology, and so on. Another frequent method of subdivision is by biome studied, e.g., Arctic ecology (or polar ecology), tropical ecology, desert ecology, marine ecology, etc. The primary technique used for investigation is often used to subdivide the discipline into groups such as chemical ecology, molecular ecology, field ecology, quantitative ecology, theoretical ecology, and so forth.

Subdivisions of ecology are not mutually exclusive; indeed, very few exist in isolation. Many of them overlap, complement and inform each other. For example, the population ecology of an organism is a consequence of its behavioral ecology and intimately tied to its community ecology. Methods from molecular ecology might inform the study of the population, and all kinds of data are modeled and analyzed using quantitative ecology techniques, often motivated by basic results in theoretical ecology.