Ecology

Ecology (from the greek oikos, “home”, and logos, “to study”) is the scientific study of the interaction between organisms and their environments.

The environment includes abiotic factors, such as temperature, light, water, and nutrients. Just as important in their effects on organisms are biotic factors - the other organisms that are past of any individual’s environment.

Organisms are affected by their environment, but by their very presence and activities, they also change it - often dramatically. Through their metabolism, microorganisms in a lake at night reduce the oxygen and lower the pH of the lake. Trees reduce light levels on the floor of the forest as they grow some times making the environment unsuitable for their own offspring. Throughout our survey of ecology, we’ll see many more examples of how organisms and their environments affect one another.

Acid rain localized famine aggravated by land misuse and population growth, the growing list of species, extinct or endangered because of habitat destruction, and the poisoning of soil and streams with toxic wastes are just a few problems that threaten the home we share with millions of other forms of life. The science of ecology provides the necessary background for us to understand these problems and to solve them.

Ecology is the study of the distribution and abundance of organisms. The questions of ecology are extremely wide-ranging. What factors determine where species are found, and what factors control their numbers in those locations? Specific aspects of these general questions we can find in different levels of organization in ecology. They are organismal ecology, the population, a community, the ecosystem.

Organismal ecology (sometimes called physiological ecology) is concerned with the behavioral, physiological, and morphological ways in which individual organisms meet the challenges posed by physiochemical aspects of the environment. The organism’s limits of tolerance for environmental stressors ultimately determine where it can live.

The next level of organization in ecology is the population, a group of individuals in a particular geographic area that belong to the same species. Population ecology concentrates mainly on factors that affect population size and composition.

A community consists of all the organisms that inhabit a particular area; it is an assemblage of populations of different species. Questions at this level of analysis involve the ways in which predation, competition, and other interactions among organisms affect community structure and organization.

A level of ecological study even more inclusive than the community is the ecosystem, which includes all the abiotic factors in addition to the community of species that exists in a certain area. Some critical questions at the ecosystem level concern energy flow and the cycling of chemical within and among various biotic and abiotic components.

Human population growth is based on the same general parameters that influence on the other animal and plant population: birth rate and death rate. Usually population stay relatively constant, on the other hand, it continues to expand and no one knows how long this can continue. In the meantime, the human population puts pressure on the biosphere and produces pollutants that influence on the environment.

Many territories, water basins, lakes, rivers, seas, oceans, and the atmosphere are polluted with all kinds of technological, agricultural, chemical nuclear and other wastes. The intensive development of sciences, industry and chemistry in the 20^th century has made the pollution of our environment a global problem which should be solved by all means.

All of us must remember the wise advice of a great English writer John Galsworthy who said: “If you don’t think about the future you will not have it”.

(Adapted from the Internet sites)

Дата добавления: 2015-08-03