What is Ecology?
Ecologyis the scientific study of how living organisms interact with each other and with
their environment. Because of its broad scope, ecology draws from other branches of science,
including geology, soil science, geography, meteorology, genetics, chemistry, and physics.
The study of ecology can also be broken down into sub-disciplines. Thus, if you were focus-
ing on, for example, how the physiology of an organism influences the way that organism
interacts with the environment, you would be studying the sub-discipline of ecophysiology.
Similarly, you could come up with terminology for studying the roles of behavior, popula-
tions, communities, ecosystems, landscapes, evolution, and even politics!
You could also sub-divide ecology according to the species of interest into fields such as
animal ecology, plant ecology, insect ecology, etc., or according to biome, an ecological
formation that exists over a large region, such as the Arctic, the tropics, or the desert
(Figure23.1). Perhaps you can come up with some of your own terms for combining some
of these specialties, or think of some other specialties yourself!
Figure 23.1: An example of a biome, the Atacama Desert, in Chile. ( 4 )Finally, because of the way ecologists study their discipline and because of the number of
other fields involved, many methods can be employed to study how organisms interact with
each other and their environment. Can you think of what some of these methods might be?
One obvious type of research that comes to mind is field studies, since ecologists generally
are interested in the world of nature. This involves collecting data in the natural world, as
opposed to laboratory settings with controls. One example of this kind of study is deter-
mining how many organisms occupy a specific geographical area. This usually involves a
technique called sampling, where an area is divided into a certain sized plot, and the number
of organisms in that area is counted.