Advances in Ecological Theory
Overview
A number of scientific disciplines have come together in the last few decades, combining with each other to give a much more complete understanding of the way that organisms interact with each other and their surroundings to form an ecosystem. The science of ecology has grown vastly more sophisticated in the recent past, sparked in part by the growing ecological awareness of the public and their insistence on ecological studies. Among the subdisciplines now included in ecological theory are population genetics, population and ecological computer modeling, and hydrogeology. It is somewhat ironic that previous ecological errors have actually helped fuel current ecological theories, as efforts to correct these earlier mistakes require a deeper understanding of what a healthy ecology should look like.
Background
Humans have long had an impact on their environment through hunting, agriculture, and city building, even in earliest times. Until recently, however, very little was known about the environment that was being changed. To be sure, hunter-gatherer cultures developed empirical knowledge of their surroundings because it was necessary for survival. But there is little, if any, extant evidence of such early observations that relates the way in which the various parts of the environment interacted in their time.
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