Ancient carbon trapped in Arctic permafrost is extremely sensitive to sunlight and, if exposed to the surface when long-frozen soils melt and collapse, can release climate-warming carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere much ...
Environment
Feb 11, 2013
240
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An elementary school science activity asks children who have each been assigned a wetland plant or animal to connect themselves with string and tape to other "organisms" their assigned plant or animal interacts with in some ...
Ecology
Jun 22, 2012
1
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In the early 1990s, overfishing led to the collapse of one of the most bountiful cod fisheries in the world, off the coast of Newfoundland. Twenty years later, the cod population still has not recovered, dramatically affecting ...
Ecology
Jun 1, 2012
21
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Over-fished commercial stocks of plankton-eating fish have been replaced in several locations by jellyfish species. This appears to be something of a paradox because fish move quickly and can see their prey, ...
Hurricanes, wildfires and influxes of pollutants create disturbances that can put ecological systems under extreme stress. Ecologists had believed that at times like these, competition between species becomes less important ...
Ecology
Jun 28, 2010
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0
Transparent sea cucumbers, bowl-shaped sponges, and pink sea pigs are some of the fascinating animals discovered during a deep-sea expedition to the Pacific Ocean.
Plants & Animals
Jun 5, 2024
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260
Most people find sharks threatening. Who doesn't have an image in their mind of a menacing shark fin racing through the ocean in search of its next meal?
Plants & Animals
Mar 1, 2023
0
7
Shallow reefs and the creatures that inhabit them are changing due to rising ocean temperatures, but these impacts have been obscured by a lack of comprehensive local data. A team of researchers in Australia has been tracking ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 22, 2022
0
20
University College Cork (UCC) researchers have found that that cloudier waters, caused in part by climate change, is making it harder for seabirds to catch fish.
Plants & Animals
Jul 28, 2022
0
32
A Cape Cod science center and one of the world's largest shipping businesses are collaborating on a project to use robotic buoys to protect a vanishing whale from lethal collisions with ships.
Ecology
May 28, 2022
0
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Ecology (from Greek: οἶκος, oikos, "house"; -λογία, -logia, "study of") is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the distribution and abundance of organisms and their interactions with their environment. The environment of an organism includes all external factors, including abiotic ones such as climate and geology, and biotic factors, including members of the same species (conspecifics) and other species that share a habitat. If the general life science of biology is viewed as a hierarchy of levels of organization, from molecular processes, to cells, tissues and organs, and finally to the individual, the population and the ecosystem, then the study of the latter three levels belongs within the purview of ecology.
Examples of objects of ecological study include: Population processes, including reproductive behavior, mortality, bioenergetics and migrations, interspecific interactions such as predation, competition, parasitism and mutualism, plant and animal community structures and their function and resilience, and biogeochemical cycling. Because of its vast scope, ecological science is often closely related to other disciplines. Thus, molecular ecology addresses ecological questions using tools from genetics, paleoecology uses tools from archeology, and theoretical ecologists use often highly complex mathematical models to explore how ecosystems and their elements function.
Aside from pure scientific inquiry, ecology is also a highly applied science. Much of natural resource management, such as forestry, fisheries, wildlife management and habitat conservation is directly related to ecological sciences and many problems in agriculture, urban development and public health are informed by ecological considerations.
The term "ecology" has also been appropriated for philosophical ideologies like social ecology and deep ecology and is sometimes used as a synonym for the natural environment or environmentalism. Likewise "ecological" is often taken in the sense of environmentally friendly.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
