Ecology and Climatology

Ecology is the study of the interactions of organisms among themselves and with their environment. It seeks to understand patterns in nature (e.g., the spatial and temporal distribution of organisms) and the processes governing those patterns. Climatology is the study of the physical state of the atmosphere - its instantaneous state or weather, its seasonal-to-interannual variability, its long-term average condition or climate, and how climate changes over time. These two fields of scientific study are distinctly different. Ecology is a discipline within the biological sciences and has as its core the principle of natural selection. Climatology is a discipline within the geophysical sciences based on applied physics and fluid dynamics. Both, however, share a common history. The origin of these sciences is attributed to Aristotle and Theophrastus and their books Meteorological and Inquiry into Plants, respectively, but their modern beginnings trace back to natural history and plant geography. Seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century naturalists and geographers saw changes in vegetation as they explored new regions and laid the foundation for the development of ecology and climatology as they sought explanations for these geographic patterns. Alexander von Humboldt, in the early 1800s, observed that widely separated regions have structurally and functionally similar vegetation if their climates are similar. Alphonse de Candolle hypothesized that latitudinal zones of tropical, temperate, and arctic vegetation were caused by temperature and in 1874 proposed formal vegetation zones with associated temperature limits.