Ecosystem Concept

The ecosystem concept treats a community of organisms together with the physical, non-living factors of their environment, soil, water and climate, as one interacting unit rather than studying organisms and environment separately. Arthur Tansley introduced the term ecosystem in his 1935 paper The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms, published in the journal Ecology; the word itself was suggested to him by the botanist Arthur Roy Clapham at his request. Eugene Odum's 1953 textbook Fundamentals of Ecology later made the ecosystem the organizing unit of the whole field, treating it as a system whose properties are more than the sum of its parts.