| / English Dictionary |
ECOLOGIST
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
A biologist who studies the relation between organisms and their environment
Classified under:
Hypernyms ("ecologist" is a kind of...):
biologist; life scientist ((biology) a scientist who studies living organisms)
Derivation:
ecology (the branch of biology concerned with the relations between organisms and their environment)
ecology (the environment as it relates to living organisms)
Context examples:
If global climate keeps warming at the current rate, we expect emperor penguins in Antarctica to experience an 86% decline by the year 2100, says Stephanie Jenouvrier, a seabird ecologist at WHOI and lead author of the paper.
(Unless warming is slowed, emperor penguins will march toward extinction, National Science Foundation)
By tracking 'gators, the ecologists determined that alligators remain in marine habitats for longer periods around spring tides — tides just after a full or new moon, when there's the greatest difference between high and low water. (In contrast, neap tides occur just after the first or third quarters of the moon, when there is the least change between high and low water.)
(Alligators, rulers of the swamps, link marine and freshwater ecosystems, NSF)
It is completely unexpected, and particularly significant since this colony represented nearly one third of the king penguins in the world, said lead author Henri Weimerskirch, an ecologist at the Center for Biological Studies in Chize, France, who first saw the colony in 1982.
(Study: World's Largest King Penguin Colony Declines Sharply, VOA)
We now know that these areas, once thought to be barren and stable, are actually quite dynamic, said Ricardo Letelier, an Oregon State University biogeochemist and ecologist who, in collaboration with scientist David Karl at the University of Hawaii, led the study.
(North Pacific Ocean fertilized by iron in Asian dust, National Science Foundation)
A research team led by ecologists Sunita Shah Walter of the University of Delaware and Peter Girguis of Harvard University has shown that underground aquifers near the undersea Mid-Atlantic Ridge act like natural biological reactors, pulling in cold, oxygenated seawater, and allowing microbes to consume more refractory carbon than scientists believed.
(Microbes in underground aquifers beneath deep-sea Mid-Atlantic Ridge 'chow down' on carbon, National Science Foundation)
The work represents an unprecedented monitoring of soils and forests from hot tropical forests to cold boreal forests and fills important gaps in our understanding of how organisms in different levels of an ecosystem's food chain are linked via temperature, ecologist Brian Enquist said.
(From tropical to boreal ecosystems, temperature drives functioning, National Science Foundation)
In a new study of African buffalo, University of Georgia (UGA) ecologist Vanessa Ezenwa has found that de-worming drastically improves an animal's chances of surviving bovine tuberculosis—but with the consequence of increasing the spread of TB in the population.
(Treatment for parasitic worms helps animals survive infectious diseases--and spread them, NSF)
We had a good approximation of the total number of land plant species, but we didn't have a handle on how many there really are, said lead author Brian Enquist, an ecologist at the University of Arizona.
(Nearly 40% of plant species are very rare, and vulnerable to climate change, National Science Foundation)
Camrin Braun, a University of Washington marine ecologist and lead author of the study, says the behavior of the blue sharks was similar to that of white sharks the team tracked in a study last year.
(Blue sharks use ocean eddies as fast-tracks to food, National Science Foundation)
"Now there is a recognition of the importance of how the leaf area is arrayed in three dimensions," says study author Robert Fahey, a forest ecologist at UConn.
(Structural complexity in forests improves carbon capture, National Science Foundation)
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