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1 - Introduction

Gordon B. Bonan
Gordon B. Bonan
Affiliation:
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado
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Summary

Ecological climatology – concepts

Scientific origins

Ecology is the study of 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 (circa 350 BC) and Theophrastus (circa 300 BC) and their books Meteorologica and Enquiry 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 are caused by temperature and in 1874 proposed formal vegetation zones with associated temperature limits.

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Ecological Climatology
Concepts and Applications
 , pp. 1 - 12
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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  • Introduction
  • Gordon B. Bonan, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado
  • Book: Ecological Climatology
  • Online publication: 05 April 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511805530.002
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  • Introduction
  • Gordon B. Bonan, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado
  • Book: Ecological Climatology
  • Online publication: 05 April 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511805530.002
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Gordon B. Bonan, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado
  • Book: Ecological Climatology
  • Online publication: 05 April 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511805530.002
Available formats
×