Plant Ecology and Sustainability Science

Introduction

The biological sciences are traditionally organized by scale (cells, tissues, organisms, populations, communities, ecosystems, etc.), taxonomic grouping (plants, animals, fungi, etc.), or process (competition, mutualism, evolution, etc.). In all of these organizational schemes, there has been a tendency to view the natural world as divided into two fundamentally different parts: humans and everything else. Even integrative fields such as ecology have often focused on “pristine” systems in the sense of trying to understand how ecosystems operate in the absence of human influence. Although the technique of using simplified systems to understand the fundamental properties of more complex systems has a long tradition in science (e.g., the idea of the frictionless plane developed by Galileo), the very act of simplifying the system alters the balancing and reinforcing feedback loops that have the potential to amplify or mute fundamental interactions between human actions and...