Modeling human communities as integral parts of ecosystems poses special problems for the development and testing of ecological theory
DOI: 10.1511/2000.35.416
The science of ecology was born from the expansive curiosity of the biologists of the late 19th century, who wished to understand the distribution, abundance and interactions of the earth's organisms. Why do we have so many species, and why not more, they asked—and what causes them to be distributed as they are? What are the characteristics of a biological community that cause it to recover in a particular way after a disturbance?
Photograph by Corinna Gries, Arizona State University
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