Early beginnings Ecology has a complex origin due in large part to its interdisciplinary nature.

[217] Ancient philosophers of Greece, including Hippocrates and Aristotle were among the first to record their observations on natural history. However, philosophers in ancient Greece viewed life as a static element that did not require an understanding of adaptation, a modern cornerstone of ecological theory.[218] Topics more familiar in the modern context, including food chains, population regulation, and productivity, did not develop until the 1700s through the published works of microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (16321723) and botanist Richard Bradley (1688?-1732).[6] Biogeographer Alexander von Humbolt (17691859) was another early pioneer in ecological thinking and was among the first to recognize ecological gradients. Humbolt alluded to the modern ecological law of species to area relationships.

In the early 20th century, ecology was an analytical form of natural history.[221] Following in the traditions of Aristotle, the descriptive nature of natural history examined the interaction of organisms with both their environment and their community. Natural historians, including James Hutton and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, contributed significant works that laid the foundations of the modern ecological sciences.[222] The term "ecology" (German: Oekologie) is of a more recent origin and was first coined by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel in his book Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866). Haeckel was a zoologist, artist, writer, and later in life a professor of comparative anatomy.

Ernst Haeckel (left) and Eugenius Warming (right), two founders of ecology

By ecology we mean the body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature-the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and its organic environment; including, above all, its friendly and inimical relations with those animals and plants with which it comes directly or indirectly into contact-in a word, ecology is the study of all those complex interrelations referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the struggle of existence. -Haeckel's definition quoted in Esbjorn-Hargens[225]:6

Opinions differ on who was the founder of modern ecological theory. Some mark Haeckel's definition as the beginning,[226] others say it was Eugenius Warming with the writing of Oecology of Plants: An Introduction to the Study of Plant Communities (1895).[227] Ecology may also be thought to have begun with Carl Linnaeus' research principals on the economy of nature that matured in the early 18th century.[81][228] He founded an early branch of ecological study he called the economy of nature.[81] The works of Linnaeus influenced Darwin in The Origin of Species where he adopted the usage of Linnaeus' phrase on the economy or polity of nature.[223] Linnaeus was the first to frame the balance of nature as a testable hypothesis. Haeckel, who admired Darwin's work, defined ecology in reference to the economy of nature which has led some to question if ecology is synonymous with Linnaeus' concepts for the economy of nature.

The modern synthesis of ecology is a young science, which first attracted substantial formal attention at the end of the 19th century (around the same time as evolutionary studies) and become even more popular during the 1960s environmental movement,[222] though many observations, interpretations and discoveries relating to ecology extend back to much earlier studies in natural history. For example, the concept on the balance or regulation of nature can be traced back to Herodotos (died c. 425 BC) who described an early account of mutualism along the Nile river where crocodiles open their mouths to beneficially allow sandpipers safe access to remove leeches.[217] In the broader contributions to the historical development of the ecological sciences, Aristotle is considered one of the earliest naturalists who had an influential role in the philosophical development of ecological sciences. One of Aristotle's students, Theophrastus, made astute ecological observations about plants and posited a philosophical stance about the autonomous relations between plants and their environment that is more in line with modern ecological thought. Both Aristotle and Theophrastus made extensive observations on plant and animal migrations, biogeography, physiology, and their habits in what might be considered an analog of the modern ecological niche.[229][230] Hippocrates, another Greek philosopher, is also credited with reference to ecological topics in its earliest developments.

From Aristotle to Darwin the natural world was predominantly considered static and unchanged since its original creation. Prior to The Origin of Species there was little appreciation or understanding of the dynamic and reciprocal relations between organisms, their adaptations and their modifications to the environment.[233][225] While Charles Darwin is most notable for his treatise on evolution,[234] he is also one of the founders of soil ecology.[235] In The Origin of Species Darwin also made note of the first ecological experiment that was published in 1816.[231] In the science leading up to Darwin the notion of evolving species was gaining popular support. This scientific paradigm changed the way that researchers approached the ecological sciences.

The layout of the first ecological experiment, noted by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species, was studied in a grass garden at Woburn Abbey in 1817. The experiment studied the performance of different mixtures of species planted in different kinds of soils.

After the turn of 20th century Some suggest that the first ecological text (Natural History of Selborne) was published in 1789, by Gilbert White (17201793).[238] The first American ecology book was published in 1905 by Frederic Clements.[239] In his book, Clements forwarded the idea of plant communities as a superorganism. This publication launched a debate between ecological holism and individualism that lasted until the 1970s. The Clements superorganism concept proposed that ecosystems progress through regular and determined stages of seral development that are analogous to developmental stages of an organism whose parts function to maintain the integrity of the whole. The Clementsian paradigm was challenged by Henry Gleason.[240] According to Gleason, ecological communities develop from the unique and

coincidental association of individual organisms. This perceptual shift placed the focus back onto the life histories of individual organisms and how this relates to the development of community associations.[241] The Clementsian superorganism theory has not been completely rejected, but some suggest it was an overextended application of holism.[115] Holism remains a critical part of the theoretical foundation in contemporary ecological studies.[163] Holism was first introduced in 1926 by a polarizing historical figure, a South African General named Jan Christian Smuts. Smuts was inspired by Clement's superorganism theory as he developed and published on the concept of holism, which contrasts starkly against his racial political views as the father of apartheid.[242] Around the same time, Charles Elton pioneered the concept of food chains in his classical book "Animal Ecology".[86] Elton[86] defined ecological relations using concepts of food chains, food cycles, food size, and described numerical relations among different functional groups and their relative abundance. Elton's 'food cycle' was replaced by 'food web' in a subsequent ecological text.[243] Ecology has developers in many nations, including Russia's Vladimir Vernadsky and his founding of the biosphere concept in the 1920s[244] or Japan's Kinji Imanishi and his concepts of harmony in nature and habitat segregation in the 1950s.[245] The scientific recognition or importance of contributions to ecology from other cultures is hampered by language and translation barriers.

OUTLINE OF ECOLOGY

Acoustic ecology, sometimes called ecoacoustics or soundscape studies, is the relationship, mediated through sound, between living beings and their environment. Agroecology is the application of ecological principles to the production of food, fuel, fiber, and pharmaceuticals and the management of agroecosystems. The term encompasses a broad range of approaches, and may be considered as "a science, a movement, [or] a practice." The prefix agro- refers to agriculture. Chemical ecology is the study of the chemicals involved in the interactions of living organisms. It focuses on the production of and response to signaling molecules (i.e. semiochemicals) and toxins. Chemical ecology is of particular importance among ants and other social insects including bees, wasps, and termites as a means of communication essential to social organization. In addition, this area of ecology deals with studies involving defensive chemicals which are utilized to deter potential predators, which may attack a wide variety of species. Cultural ecology is the study of human adaptations to social and physical environments. Human adaptation refers to both biological and cultural processes that enable a population to survive and reproduce within a given or changing environment.[1] This may be carried out diachronically (examining entities that existed in different epochs), or synchronically (examining a present system and its components). The central argument is that the natural environment, in small scale or subsistence societies dependent in part upon it - is a major contributor to social organization and other human institutions. A guild (or ecological guild) is any group of species that exploit the same resources, often in related ways.[1][2][3] As can be seen from the list of examples below, it does not follow that the species within a guild occupy the same, or even similar, ecological niches. Guilds are defined according to the locations, the attributes, and the activities of their component species; for example, their mode of acquiring nutrients, their mobility, and the zones of their habitat that they occupy or otherwise exploit.

Industrial Ecology (IE) is the study of material and energy flows through industrial systems. Industrial ecology seeks to quantify the material flows and document the industrial processes that make modern society function. Industrial ecology is a young but growing multidisciplinary field of research which combines aspects of engineering, economics, sociology, toxicology and the natural sciences. In the context of an evolving information society, the term information ecology marks a connection between ecological ideas with the dynamics and properties of the increasingly dense, complex and important digital informational environment and has been gaining progressively wider acceptance in a growing number of disciplines. "Information ecology" often is used as metaphor, viewing the informational space as an ecosystem. Insect ecology is the scientific study of how insects, individually or as a community, interact with the surrounding environment or ecosystem. The idea of a knowledge ecosystem is an approach to knowledge management which claims to foster the dynamic evolution of knowledge interactions between entities to improve decision-making and innovation through improved evolutionary networks of collaboration. Landscape ecology is the science of studying and improving relationships between ecological processes in the environment and particular ecosystems. This is done within a variety of landscape scales, development spatial patterns, and organizational levels of research and policy. Paleoecology uses data from fossils and subfossils to reconstruct the ecosystems of the past. It involves the study of fossil organisms and their associated remains, including their life cycle, living interactions, natural environment, and manner of death and burial to reconstruct the paleoevironment. The idea of public ecology has recently emerged in response to increasing disparities over political, social, and environmental concerns. Of particular interest are the processes that generate, evaluate and apply knowledge in political, social, and environmental arenas. Public ecology offers a way of framing sustainability problems, community dynamics and social issues. Forests, watersheds, parks, flora, fauna, air, and water all constitute environmental quality and are therefore public goods. The processes society engages in to negotiate the meaning of these goods, upon which decisions and actions are based, reside within the public domain. Restoration ecology is the scientific study and practice of renewing and restoring degraded, damaged, or destroyed ecosystems and habitats in the environment by active human intervention and action, within a short time frame. Restoration ecology emerged as a separate field in ecology in the 1980s. The term restoration ecology is used for the academic study of the process, whereas "ecological restoration" is the term used for the actual project or process by the commercial practitioners. Reverse ecology refers to the use of genomics to study ecology with no a priori assumptions about the organism(s) under consideration. Theoretical ecology is the scientific discipline devoted to the study of ecological systems using theoretical methods such as simple conceptual models, mathematical models, computational simulations, and advanced data analysis. Urban ecology is a subfield of ecology which deals with the interaction between organisms in an urban or urbanized community, and their interaction with that community. Urban ecologists study the trees, rivers, wildlife and open spaces found in cities to understand the extent of those resources and the way they are affected by pollution, over-development and other pressures.[1] Urban ecology is most concerned with the interaction of human beings and the environment with regard to ecosystem services in the urban setting. Analysis of urban settings in the context of ecosystem ecology (looking at the cycling of matter and the flow of energy through the ecosystem) may ultimately help us to design healthier, better managed communities, by understanding what threats the urban environment brings to humans. There is an emphasis on planning communities with an ecological design, by using alternative building materials and methods. This is in order to promote a healthy and biodiverse urban ecosystem.