Here is your Speech on Ecology !
Conventionally, ecology has been defined variously by different classical and modern ecologists with different viewpoints. Quite oddly, no universally accepted definition of ecology has been formulated by any ecologist so far, and for the better understanding of scope, limitations, purpose, and mode of study of different ecological phenomena, one has to go through following chronologically arranged definitions of ecology:
Ernst Haeckel (1866) defined ecology “as the body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature—the investigation of the total relations of animal to its inorganic and organic environment.
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An American plant ecologist, Frederick Clements (1916) considered ecology to be “the science of community.” British ecologist Charles Elton (1927) defined ecology as “the scientific natural history concerned with the sociology and economics of animals. Taylor (1936) preferred to define ecology as “the science of the relations of all organisms to all their environments.
A much broader definition of ecology of Allee et ah, (1949), considered ecology as “the science of inter-relation between living organisms and their environment, including both the physical and biotic environments, and emphasizing interspecies as well as intra-species relations.
G. L. Clarke (1954) defined ecology as “the study of inter-relations of plants and animals with their environment which may include the influences of other plants and animals present as well as those of the physical features. Woodbury (1955) regarded ecology as “the science which investigates organisms in relation to their environment: a philosophy in which the world of life is interpreted in terms of natural processes.
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British ecologist, A. Macfadyen (1957) defined ecology as “a science which concerns itself with the inter-relationships of living organisms, plants and animals, and their environments” Likewise; S. C. Kendeigh (1961, 1974) defined ecology as “the study of animals and plants in their relation to each other and to their environment.”
Further, Andrewartha (1961) defined ecology as “the scientific study of the distribution, and abundance of organisms.” T. Lewis and L. R. Taylor (1967) have defined ecology as “the study of the way in which individual organisms, populations of some species and communities of populations respond to these changes.”
G. A. Petrides (1968) defined ecology as “the study of environmental interactions which control the welfare of living things, regulating their distribution, abundance, production and evolution.”
American ecologist Eugene Odum (1971) preferred to define ecology as “the study of the structure and function of ecosystems or broadly of nature.” C. J. Krebs (1972) considered Odum’s definition of ecology as quite ambiguous and instead of it; he provided a modified version of Andrewartha’s definition of ecology, which defined ecology as “the scientific study of interactions that determine the distribution and abundance of organisms”
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Recently, certain modern ecologists have provided somewhat broader definitions of ecology. Thus, M. E. Clark (1973) considers ecology as “a study of ecosystems or the totality of the reciprocal interactions between living organisms and their physical surroundings.”
Pinaka (1973) defined ecology as “the study of relations between organisms and the totality of the biological and physical factors affecting them or influenced by them” Southwick (1976) defined ecology as “the scientific study of the relationships of living organisms with each other and with their environments.”
He further elaborates his definition of ecology by saying that “it is the science of biological interactions among individuals, populations, and communities; and it is also the science of ecosystems—the inter-relations of biotic communities with their non-living environments.”
R. L. Smith (1977) prefers to consider ecology as “a multidisciplinary science which deals with the organism and its place to live and which focus on the ecosystem.”
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