THEORETICAL ECOLOGY Ecology is a young science. The word ecology itself was coined not much more than 100 years ago, and the oldest professional society, the British Ecological Society, is less than a century old. Arguably the first published work on ecology was Gilbert Whites The Natural History of Selborne. This book, published in 1789, was ahead of its time in seeing plants and animals not as individual objects of wonder things to be assembled in a cabinet of curiosities but as parts of a community of living organisms, interacting with the environment, other organisms, and humans. The book has not merely remained in print, but has run steadily through well over 200 editions and translations, to attain the status of the fourth most published …show more content…
There has been a marked rise in theoretical ecology as a distinct sub-discipline over the past three decades or so. Many of the practitioners are not to be found in the field or laboratory; a greater number, however, find their experimental contributions in field and/or laboratory to be inextricably interwoven with their theoretical and mathematical contributions. Ecology has come a long way from the 1970s, when a few empirical ecologists resented outsiders, who had not paid their dues of years of toil in the field, presuming to mathematize their problems . In the latter, you will find very few equations. Today, in contrast, you will find a balanced blend of observation, field and laboratory experiments, and theory expressed in mathematical terms. Theoretical ecology is the use of conceptual, mathematical and computational methods to address ecological problems. Theoretical ecology aims to explain a diverse range of phenomena in the life science, such as population growth dynamics, competitions, evolutionary theory, epidemiology, 16 animal behaviour and group dynamics, food webs, ecosystems,spacial ecology and the effects of climate