Ecology and Environment — Definition

Definition

Ecology studies relationships among organisms and between organisms and their physical environment. It explains how populations change, species interact, energy moves through food webs and nutrients circulate between living and non-living components.

An ecosystem includes both the organisms and the physical conditions with which they interact; it is not simply a list of species. Environmental management applies these relationships to problems such as habitat loss, pollution and resource use.

A useful ecological explanation identifies the mechanism and scale involved, because a population response, an ecosystem process and a conservation intervention answer different questions.