Ecology

The word ecology comes from the Greek oikos (house or dwelling place) and logos (study) — literally the 'study of the household' an organism lives in; the term was originally coined as oekologie. It was first proposed by Reiter in 1868, though the definition that eventually became the most widely accepted one was given the following year, in 1869, by Ernst Haeckel. Three names are closely tied to the growth of the discipline and are conventionally remembered together: Alexander von Humboldt, honoured as the Father of Ecology for his pioneering work linking vegetation patterns to climate and geography; Eugene P. Odum, called the Father of Modern Ecology for the influential systems-level textbooks that shaped the field i …