Ecology is the study of how living things interact with their surroundings. A significant portion of the most urgent issues facing humanity today are ecological in nature. These issues include growing populations, food shortages, environmental pollution, including global warming, the loss of plant and animal species, and all the related sociological and political issues.
Ernst Haeckel in the mid-1870s.
Ernst Haeckel, a German zoologist, used the term "oekologie," which means "relation of the animal both to its organic as well as its inorganic environment," to coin the word ecology. The Greek term oikos, which means "household," "home," or "place to live," is where the phrase originates. Ecology, then, is the study of the organism and its surroundings. The physical surrounds and other living things are both included in the concept of environment. It deals with interpersonal connections.
Interest in population dynamics emerged at the same time. Early in the 19th century, the English economist Thomas Malthus highlighted the tension between growing populations and the planet's capacity to sustain life, which gave rise to a special interest in population dynamics.
The mathematical underpinnings for the study of populations were established in the 1920s by the American chemist and statistician Alfred J. Lotka, the Italian mathematician Vito Volterra, and the American zoologist Raymond Pearl. These investigations focused on the interactions between predators and prey, the competitive relationships between species, and the regulation of populations. The discovery in 1920 that nesting birds exhibited territoriality sparked research into how behavior affects population sizes.
Some ecologists focused on energy budgets, while others studied the dynamics of populations and communities. The idea of trophic, or feeding, levels was first proposed by German freshwater biologist August Thienemann in 1920. This concept describes how food energy is passed from green plants, which are the producers, up to various animal levels, who are the consumers. This method was expanded upon by the English animal ecologist Charles Elton (1927) through the use of ecological niches and number pyramids. When assessing the energy budgets of lakes in the 1930s, American freshwater biologists Edward Birge and Chancey Juday came up with the concept of primary productivity, which refers to the rate at which food energy is produced, or fixed, by photosynthesis.
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