The first use of ecosystem

The word ecosystem is a relatively recent term. Sir Arthur Tansley invented the word in 1935 to apply to a whole community of organisms and its environment as one unit. Tansley realised that the community could not be separated from the particular environment in which it lived. The physical features of the habitat plus the climatic influences determine which species form the basic structure of the community. For many years, ecologists had realised that a habitat, and the community it contains, are a single working system. They applied many terms to this concept, but apart from ecosystem, only one earlier word, biocoenose (Möbius, 1877), is frequently used, especially in Europe and Russia.

The ecosystem, or biocoenose, consists of the community of organisms plus the associated physical environment. The main features of the abiotic environment (as discussed in Section 9.2) are climate, soil and water status (land, freshwater aquatic or marine); other features include geology, topography and depth below sea level, or altitude above it. We have already looked at some of the organisms which occur in ecosystems: both autecological studies of species (see Chapter 3) and species in communities (Chapter 14). The study of ecosystems is included in synecology as all the organisms and environmental factors are studied as an integrated unit.