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Comparative Plant Ecology as a Tool for Integrating Across Scales
E-mail: bill.shipley@USherbrooke.ca
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Ecology, like other sciences, can be divided into various subdisciplines: physiological ecology, population ecology, community ecology, evolutionary ecology, and so on. Although the boundaries between these subdisciplines are never strictly delimited, most ecologists would agree on the assignment of most studies to particular subdisciplines because the differentiating features of these subdisciplines refer to levels of biological organization (individuals, populations, communities) and types of research questions. Because these subdisciplines concentrate on different levels of biological organization, they tend to measure different variables and ask different questions and this makes it difficult to integrate our ecological knowledge across these different levels of organization. This potential ‘balkanization’ must