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24 - Ecosystems

from PART III - NEW OBJECTS AND IDEAS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2009

By
Pascal Acot
Edited by
Peter J. Bowler  and
John V. Pickstone
Peter J. Bowler
Affiliation:
Queen's University Belfast
John V. Pickstone
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
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Summary

The word “ecosystem” (from the Greek oïkos, meaning “house” or “habitat,” and sustêma, meaning “set”) was coined in 1935 by the British plant ecologist Arthur George Tansley (1871–1955):

[T]he more fundamental conception is, as it seems to me, the whole system (in the sense of physics), including not only the organism-complex, but also the whole complex of physical factors forming what we call the environment of the biome – the habitat factors in the widest sense. … These ecosystems, as we may call them, are of the most various kinds and sizes.

This definition synthesized three main features of scientific ecology during the interwar years: This new branch of biology was to be devoted to the study of the relations between biotic (i.e., plant and animal) communities and their environment, the ontological status of these communities was still debated, and the question of the true nature of their interdependence with purely physical factors, such as solar energy, was gradually coming to the forefront. The fact that Tansley’s concept was not even mentioned in J. R. Carpenter’s famous ecological glossary (1938), which contains one of the earliest historical surveys of scientific ecology, suggests that this novelty went largely unnoticed before the Second World War. In the 1940s, however, the young North American limnologist Raymond Laurel Lindeman (1916–1942) developed an innovative ecosystems theory close to the presently accepted paradigm.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 451 - 466
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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