Kids Research Express

Ecology Ecology, the study of the relationship of plants and animals to their physical and biological environment. The physical environment includes light and heat or solar radiation, moisture, wind, oxygen, carbon dioxide, nutrients in soil, water, and atmosphere. The biological environment includes organisms of the same kind as well as other plants and animals. Because of the diverse approaches required to study organisms in their environment, ecology draws upon such fields as climatology, hydrology, oceanography, physics, chemistry, geology, and soil analysis. To study the relationships between organisms, ecology also involves such disparate sciences as animal behavior, taxonomy, physiology, and mathematics. An increased public awareness of environmental problems has made ecology a common but often misused word. It is confused with environmental programs and environmental science (see Environment ). Although the field is a distinct scientific discipline, ecology does indeed contribu...

Rooted as they are in the ground, plants are commonly thought of as leading sedentary, vegetative, passive lives. However, a look at the ingeniously developed interactions that plants have with the other organisms in their ecosystems quickly corrects this notion. Cooperation and Competition Many plant species exist as separate male and female plants, and pollen from male flowers must reach the female flowers in order for pollination and seed development to take place. The agent of pollination is sometimes the wind (a part of the physical environment), but in many cases it is an insect, bat, or bird (members of the biological environment). Plants may also rely on agents for dispersing their seed. Thus, after pollination, cherry trees develop cherries that attract birds, which ingest the fruit and excrete the cherry stones in more distant terrains. Plants have evolved many other mutually beneficial relationships, such as the nitrogen-fixing bacteria that occur in the nodules on t...