Ten Suggestions to Strengthen the Science of Ecology

E is the science that addresses the relationship between living things and their environment (Haeckel 1866). It has also been called the science that accounts for the abundance and distribution of species (Andrewartha and Birch 1954). These simple phrases define a field that encompasses an immense range of organizational, spatial, and temporal scales. Organizationally, ecology deals with the characteristics of individual organisms (e.g., physiological and behavioral ecology) and their evolution (e.g., evolutionary ecology), the dynamics of species populations (e.g., population ecology),and the interactions among populations of different species and their physical–chemical environment (e.g., community, landscape, and ecosystem ecology). Ecology deals with spatial scales ranging from parts of individuals (e.g., leaf physiology) through the entire planet (biosphere dynamics) and with temporal scales of seconds or minutes (e.g., physiology and behavior) through evolutionary time that can reach tens of thousands or even millions of years. Tangentially, ecology also incorporates studies of environments from past times on our planet (paleoecology), studies of our planet’s physical characteristics (soil, atmosphere, and geochemistry), and even studies of the potential Ten Suggestions to Strengthen the Science of Ecology