Areas of study

Ecology is necessarily the union of many areas of study because its definition is so all-encompassing. There are many kinds of relationships between organisms and their environment. By organisms one might mean single individuals, groups of individuals, all the members of one species, the sum of many species, or the total mass of species (biomass) in an ecosystem. And the term environment includes not only physical and chemical features but also the biological environment, which involves yet more organisms.

In practice, ecology is composed of broadly overlapping approaches and further divided by the groups of species to be studied. There are many, for example, who specialize in the field of “bird behavioral ecology.” The main approaches fall into the following classes.

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Evolutionary ecology examines the environmental factors that drive species adaptation. Studies of the evolution of species might seek to answer the question of how populations have changed genetically over several generations but might not necessarily attempt to learn what the underlying mechanisms might be. Evolutionary ecology seeks those mechanisms. Thus, in the well-known example of the peppered moth, the populations in the industrialized English Midlands changed over generations from having wings coloured largely grayish white, peppered with black spots, to wings that were mostly blackish. The ecological mechanism involved predation—birds readily detected the light-coloured moths against the background of the tree trunks that industrial pollution had darkened, whereas the dark-coloured moths remained generally undetected.

Evolutionary ecology also examines broader issues, such as the observations that plants in arid environments often have no leaves or else very small ones or that some species of birds have helpers at the nest—individuals that raise young other than their own. A critical question for the subject is whether a set of adaptations arose once and has simply been retained by all species descended from a common ancestor having those adaptations or whether the adaptations evolved repeatedly because of the same environmental factors. In the case of plants that live in arid environments, cacti from the New World and euphorbia (see spurge) from the Old World can look strikingly similar even though they are in unrelated plant families.

Physiological ecology asks how organisms survive in their environments. There is often an emphasis on extreme conditions, such as very cold or very hot environments or aquatic environments with unusually high salt concentrations. Examples of the questions it may explore are: How do some animals flourish in the driest deserts, where temperatures are often high and freestanding water is never available? How do bacteria survive in hot springs, such as those in Yellowstone National Park in the western United States, that would cook most species? How do nematodes live in the soils of dry valleys in Antarctica? Physiological ecology looks at the special mechanisms that the individuals of a species use to function and at the limits on species imposed by the environment.

Behavioral ecology examines the ecological factors that drive behavioral adaptations. The subject considers how individuals find their food and avoid their enemies. For example, why do some birds migrate (see migration) while others are resident? Why do some animals, such as lions, live in groups while others, such as tigers, are largely solitary?

Population ecology, or autecology, examines single species. One immediate question that the subject addresses is why some species are rare while others are abundant. Interactions with other species may supply some of the answers. For example, enemies of a species can restrict its numbers, and those enemies include predators, disease organisms, and competitors—i.e., other species. Consequently, population ecology shares an indefinite boundary with community ecology, a subject that examines the interactions between several to many species. Species abundances vary both from year to year and across the species’ geographic range. Population ecology asks what causes abundances to fluctuate. Why, for example, do numbers of some species, typically birds and mammals, change perhaps threefold or fourfold over a decade or so, while numbers of other species, typically insects, vary tenfold to a hundredfold from one year to the next? Another key question is what limits abundance, for, without limits, species numbers would grow exponentially.

Biogeography is the study of the geographical distribution of organisms, and it asks questions that parallel those of population ecology. Some species have tiny geographical ranges, being restricted to perhaps only a few square kilometres, while other species have ranges that cover a continent. Some species have more-or-less fixed geographical ranges, while others fluctuate, and still others are on the increase. If a species that is spreading is an agricultural pest, a disease organism, or a species that carries a disease, understanding the reasons for the increasing range may be a matter of considerable economic importance. Biogeography also considers the ranges of many species, asking why, for example, species with small geographic ranges are often found in special places that house many such species rather than scattered randomly about the planet.

Community ecology, or synecology, considers the ecology of communities, the set of species found in a particular place. Because the complete set of species for a particular place is usually not known, community ecology often focuses on subsets of organisms, asking questions, for example, about plant communities or insect communities. A fundamental question deals with the size of the “set of species”—that is, what ecological factors determine how many species are present in an area. There are many large-scale patterns; for example, more species are present in larger areas than smaller ones, more on continents than on islands (especially remote ones), and more in the tropics than in the Arctic. There are many hypotheses for each pattern. Ecological factors also cause the diversity of species to vary over smaller scales. For example, though predators may be harmful to individual species, the presence of a predator may actually increase the number of species present in a community by limiting the numbers of a particularly successful competitor that otherwise might monopolize all the available space or resources.

The questions above are generally applied to species at the same trophic level—say, the plants in a community, or the insects that feed on the plants there, or the birds that feed on the insects there. Yet a different set of questions in community ecology involves how many trophic levels there are in a particular place and what factors limit that number.

Conservation biology seeks to understand what factors predispose species to extinction and what humans can do about preventing extinction. Species in danger of extinction are often those with the smallest geographic ranges or the smallest population sizes, but other ecological factors are also involved.

Ecosystem ecology examines large-scale ecological issues, ones that often are framed in terms not of species but rather of measures such as biomass, energy flow, and nutrient cycling. Questions include how much carbon is absorbed from the atmosphere by terrestrial plants and marine phytoplankton during photosynthesis and how much of that is consumed by herbivores, the herbivores’ predators, and so on up the food chain. Carbon is the basis of life (see carbon cycle), so these questions may be framed in terms of energy. How much food one has to eat each day, for instance, can be measured in terms of its dry weight or its calorie content. The same applies to measures of production for all the plants in an ecosystem or for different trophic levels of an ecosystem. A basic question in ecosystem ecology is how much production there is and what the factors are that affect it. Not surprisingly, warm, wet places such as rainforests produce more than extremely cold or dry places, but other factors are important. Nutrients are essential and may be in limited supply. The availability of phosphorus and nitrogen often determines productivity—it is the reason these substances are added to lawns and crops—and their availability is particularly important in aquatic systems. On the other hand, nutrients can represent too much of a good thing. Human activity has modified global ecosystems in ways that are increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, a carbon source but also a greenhouse gas (see greenhouse effect), and causing excessive runoff of fertilizers into rivers and then into the ocean, where it kills the species that live there.