The environment and its inhabitants. in Ecology, 3rd ed. The ecosystem concept.
Ecology is the study of the interactions between species and their environment.
The establishment of ecology as a science came after the explorations of 19th century naturalists, such as Charles Darwin. Before Darwin and the turn of the century, most field biologists were taxonomists like Carl Linneus, who traveled the Earth to collect species and to define taxonomic relationships of species from different parts of the world. Their interests lay chiefly with classifying organisms according to their similarity in morphology, and Linneus Latin binomial nomenclature is the standard we use today. Later explorers and naturalists, like Darwin, were more interested in explaining the relationships between species and their environments. Let s take a look at across North America to see how vegetation changes with changing environmental conditions.