1 minute, 28 seconds

Dr. Chris Fastie says:

Ecologists study the way nature works. Biologists study the way parts of nature work. And, ecologists study the system. The way the parts work together. And you have to choose how big a part of the system you want to study-- and I have been studying nature at the scale of a landscape: what you'd see if you climbed up a hill and looked out over acres and acres of forest or tundra or swamp. I am really interested in how that whole system-- the whole landscape-- works together. How the plants and animals affect each other. How the plants are affected by the soil and the water and the weather. And I study it using methods that most scientists use. Physicists and chemists and biologists all use essentially the same methods of starting with what we know. Starting with what we understand about how the world works and add little pieces to it. We do experiments. We make observations about things that no one has observed before, and we add piece by piece to the story of how the systems works.