Ecology Lecture Notes – Chapter 1

Ecology: The Study of Living Interactions

• Ecologists study the interactions among organisms and between organisms and their
environments.
• The tools of ecologists have changed from collecting jars and nets to chemical auto
analyzers and computers.

The Scale of Ecology: From Organisms to Ecosystems

• The field of ecology can be subdivided into broad areas of organismal, population,
community, and ecosystems ecology.
• Organismal ecology - considers how individuals are adapted to their environment and how
the behavior of an individual organism contributes to its survival and reproductive success
and the population density of the species.
• Population ecology - explores those factors that influence a population’s growth, size, and
density.
• Community ecology - studies how populations of species interact and form functional
communities and focuses on what influences the number of species in an area.
• Ecosystems ecology - examines the flow of energy and cycling of nutrients among organisms
within a community and between organisms and their environment.

The Four Main Elements of Global Change

 Animal extinction has accompanied increases in human population growth.
• The main elements of global change are habitat destruction, introduced species, pollution,
and direct exploitation.
• Amphibians and mammals are the most threatened groups of organisms on Earth.
• Population changes in one target species may have profound effects on other species that
feed on or are fed on by the target species.

Ecological Methods: Observation, Experimentation, and Analysis

• Ecological methods focus on observation, experimentation, and data analysis. A variety of
graphical techniques exist that help determine whether two variables are related or
whether experimentally altering one variable causes a significant change in the other.
• Types of experiments vary from those done in the laboratory to those done in the field.
• Meta-analysis is a statistical technique which combines results from similar experiments to
give more robust results.