ECOLOGY AND ME

Ecology Facts Where other fields of science are devoted to a type of organism or set of theories, ecology is best understood as the way in which a number of different fields of biology fit together. It looks at the interactions between living creatures and their environments, encompassing both biology and Earth science.

Interesting Ecology Facts:
Due to the way its disciplines intersect, it's hard to pinpoint when the study of ecology began.
The individual biology and Earth science disciplines all have individual time lines, some of which date back to ancient civilizations like the Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans.
Hippocrates and Aristotle were among the first recorded scientists to write down their observations on what would be considered ecology.
Herodotus recorded observations on the topics like balance in nature and regulation of what we know to be ecosystems, putting him at the forefront of early ecological research.
Some of the most important understandings of ecology came about as late as the 1700s, when scientists began to understand concepts like food chains, population management, and heredity.
Later researchers began to observe and theorize on the planet's impact on living organisms with concepts like adaptation and evolution.
The term ecology was first coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866.
Ecology focuses on life processes and adaptations, energy in living communities, the eventual growth and development of entire ecosystems, and how biodiversity manifests itself in an environment.
The human element cannot be removed from ecology, as human behaviors are understood to make a tremendous and irreparable impact on ecosystems.
Ecology encompasses all living things, from single-cellular and acellular organisms, through to the most complex of all living creatures.
Ecologists must understand an area's biodiversity, its habitats and niches, biomes and biospheres, and more in order to understand how an ecosystem builds itself.
Human ecology is broad enough to nearly be a field all to itself, and investigates people's impacts on the physical environment, our interconnectedness with animal and plant species, and various factors that influence the human condition.
While living things are predominantly the focus of ecology, soil ecology is a related field that studies the microbial inhabitants of soil, how plant life is impacted, and the overall geological health of an environment by seeking out components in the soil.