Hi. In this video will be take a look at ecology, which is the study of organisms, interactions with one another and their environment. Now just Aziz living world can be broken down into various layers of ah hierarchy. The field of ecology can also be subdivided based on these different hierarchies. So, for example, the organism is sort of the fundamental unit of the living world. Adams are to a chemist, as organisms are to an Ecologist. In a sense, now the organism is just an individual living system, and so on. Organism Ecologist is going to be interested in studying that individual living system. And so they're gonna wanna look at things like physical adaptations of on organism, for example, you know, traits that increase in organism's ability to gather or obtain food something like that. Now populations or groups of organisms of the same species that live in the same area. And it's worth noting that it's possible toe have multiple populations of one species in the same area, and that's actually a concept will visit later. Uh, now population Ecologists, they're going to want to look at things like the abundance and distribution of organisms in a population. So for example, uh, you know how many members of the population are there? Something, as seemingly simple is that is an interesting question and especially the population Ecologist. They're going to want to look at changes in this stuff over time. So are the population's increasing? Are they decreasing our populations, merging together our populations, splitting into different populations, that sort of stuff. Now community is a group of populations that cohabit the same area. Now these air populations of different species. But basically it's the sum of all the different populations of species in a particular area. And community Ecologists are going to want to look at the interactions between species. And don't let the seemingly positive term community fool you. Oftentimes this is gonna be one organism eating another organism. Now the ecosystem is basically the community, plus the physical environment. So the community is just the populations, just the organisms, the ecosystems adds the physical terrain that those organisms live in, and ecosystem Ecologists are gonna wanna look at things like the flow of nutrients and energy through ecosystems and through organisms. So looking at are images here you can see here we have a single organism. It's just a frog. Right? And here this is actually a graph of the human population. And hopefully you can see that we're looking at billions on the side here. And we're very close to that eight billion mark at present. And hopefully this chart astounds you as the rate of human population growth has been just, you know, unbelievable. In the past century, I mean, we went from having less than two billion humans on Earth ever. Two now, almost eight billion in under 100 years. Pretty mind boggling stuff. Now here we can see both the community and an ecosystem may actually jump out of the way. Now, uh, in terms of the community, you have thes fish. You have Ah, nice little starfish, their coral all around those air gonna all make up the community. Now the ecosystem here is also going to include things like the rock and the water That's all around these organisms. So you know, uh, community, I just always think of it as basically ecosystem, minus all the terrain and stuff. Now, landscapes are an idea. It's essentially, um, interconnected ecosystems. Sort of like a hierarchy glare above ecosystems. And it's helpful because, you know, ecosystems aren't just discrete units. You know, there's not a border on, you know, like a national border. I mean, on ecosystem, you know, uh, they touch each other. There's sort of transitional zones between them, and so landscapes. Sort of. Take a look at, you know, the greater picture of how ecosystems interact. And also, you know how energy and materials are going to be exchanged across ecosystems. Now, when you get all the ecosystems that exist together, what you have is the biosphere. Earth on Global ecology is going to be again. Just, you know, this study of the bio spheres, everything really often, though, they're going to be looking at the human impact on the biosphere. So they're going to be interested in things like, for example, climate change, which will be talking about at length. Now. Conservation biology is essentially the effort to counter act a lot of this stuff. It's that preserve and manage Earth's biodiversity, and we'll be talking more about that later. Now related to ecology is the study of bio geography, which is essentially the study of the distribution and species. Uh, sorry. Distribution of species and ecosystems over geologic history. So this is going to be a, for example, studying things like, you know why there are certain organisms on some continents and not others, you know, for example, here, you know, we're looking at the sort of super continent that used to exist on Earth. But, you know, of course, due to tectonic activity, you know, the continents broke apart, they went their own directions, and some types of organisms got isolated to particular continents. So, you know, these are all just ideas that bio geography is going to explore. That's that's sort of the interest that those scientists would have. So with that, let's turn the page.
