The first textbook on plant ecology was published in 1895 in Copenhagen, Denmark, entitled Plantesamfund: Grundtraek af den okologiske Plantegeografi. It was translated into German in 1896 and again in 1902, into Polish in 1900, and into Russian in 1901 and again in 1903. It first appeared in English in 1909, published by the Clarendon […]

An ecosystem is a closely woven web of plant and animal life within a particular type of physical environment. Africa has five main kinds of ecosystems: coastal environments, deserts and semideserts, mountain environments, savanna grasslands, and forests. Each ecosystem has its typical environment and climate, and the people who live there have adapted to its conditions and learned to use […]

In the wake of New Guinea, anthropologists and geographers began to rediscover common ground in what was then called cultural ecology. This approach concentrated on processes rather than material culture – subsistence, work, reproduction, and resource use – and their interrelations – as embedded in the rules and values of a particular society. The configurations could be functional, behavioral, […]

A particularly forceful oppositional response to the conventionalizing and entropy maximizing features of the agri industrial system has been the growth and salience of agroecological approaches. Agroecology emerged in the 1980s as an important attempt to establish a natural and social scientific basis for alternatives to industrialized agriculture which attempted to avoid its resource degrading tendencies. Agroecological frameworks draw upon […]

ECOLOGY IS THE study of the interaction between an organism and its physical environment. Human ecology specifically focuses on humans as a group of organisms and their mutual relationships within the habitat. The term ecology has its origin in two ancient Greek words: oikos (house or habitat) and logia (words or teaching). Thus, the concept […]