Environment

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Ecology

Biodiversity | Biogeochemistry | Biogeography | Biome | Biosphere | Coevolution | Community | Community ecology | Community succession | Ecological crisis | Ecological factors | Ecomorph | Ecosystem | Ecozone | Environment | Evolutionary biota | Food chain | Gaia | Guild | Homeostasis | Intraspecific relations | Interspecific relations | Landscape ecology | Paleoecology | Population dynamics | Population ecology | Productivity | Tiering | Trophic group | Trophic structure

Contents 1 Introduction 2 The natural environment 3 The human-modified environment 4 Reference 5 Credits

[edit] Introduction

Environment can have several meanings. It can refer to the surroundings or ecosystem in which organisms live, hence the organism's environment. So for a marine organism the environment would be that part of the ocean in which it lives.

In a larger sense, the environment comprises all living and non-living things that occur naturally on Earth.

ENVIRONMENT

Marine | Freshwater | Coastal | Terrestrial | Extreme

[edit] The natural environment

Time range (Earth): Hadean-Recent

The natural environment, can thus refer to any environments that is not the result of human activity or intervention, including the Biosphere, Geosphere, Hydrosphere, Atmosphere, etc as a whole. Of course for some 4.5 billion years these were the only environments on Earth.

As far as living organisms go, there are at least four or five types of environment [1]:

• Marine environments
• Freshwater environments
• Terrestrial environments
• Coastal environments
• Other organisms (endoparastism)

To these can be added

• Extreme environment populated by organisms (such as eubacteria and Archaea called "extremophiles"; e.g. anoxic, exceptionally hot or cold environments, or deep within the Earth's crust.

[edit] The human-modified environment

Time range (Earth): Holocene-Recent

Within a very tiny slice of time (constituting the second half of the Holocene, from about 5000 years ago or so until now) there has occured the human-made environment (agricultural, urban) which has progressively modified all the natural environments. There is also the concept of the cultural environment (which is included under the noosphere).

[edit] Reference

[1] The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Life Sciences, ed. Adrian Friday & David S. Ingram, Cambridge University Press 1985.

[edit] Credits

MAK061107 (a bit of material from wikipedia)