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Ecology is a new science and considered as an important branch of biological science, having only become prominent during the second half of the 20th century. [1] Ecological thought is derivative of established currents in philosophy, particularly from ethics and politics.
In 1967, Roderick Nash published Wilderness and the American Mind, a work that has become a classic text of early environmental history.In an address to the Organization of American Historians in 1969 (published in 1970) Nash used the expression "environmental history", [4] although 1972 is generally taken as the date when the term was first coined. [5]
From ancient times, people suspected that the climate of a region could change over the course of centuries. For example, Theophrastus, a pupil of Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle in the 4th century BC, told how the draining of marshes had made a particular locality more susceptible to freezing, and speculated that lands became warmer when the clearing of forests exposed them to sunlight.
In historical ecology, the landscape is defined as an area of interaction between human culture and the non-human environment. The landscape is a perpetually changing, physical manifestation of history. [17] Historical ecology revises the notion of the ecosystem and replaces it with the landscape. While an ecosystem is static and cyclic, a ...
Environmental issues are disruptions in the usual function of ecosystems. [1] Further, these issues can be caused by humans (human impact on the environment) [2] or they can be natural. These issues are considered serious when the ecosystem cannot recover in the present situation, and catastrophic if the ecosystem is projected to certainly ...
Ecosystems may be habitats within biomes that form an integrated whole and a dynamically responsive system having both physical and biological complexes. Ecosystem ecology is the science of determining the fluxes of materials (e.g. carbon, phosphorus) between different pools (e.g., tree biomass, soil organic material).
Furthermore, climate change may disrupt the ecology among interacting species, via changes on behaviour and phenology, or via climate niche mismatch. [9] The disruption of species-species associations is a potential consequence of climate-driven movements of each individual species in opposite directions.
A related phenomenon driven by climate change is woody plant encroachment, affecting up to 500 million hectares globally. [218] Climate change has contributed to the expansion of drier climate zones, such as the expansion of deserts in the subtropics. [219] The size and speed of global warming is making abrupt changes in ecosystems more likely ...