The History of Landscape Ecology in Europe

Abstract

It was quite obviously an expression of the bioscientific currents of his time when, in January 1869, the young Ernst Haeckel used the term Oecologie during a lecture on the developments and tasks of zoology. At the beginning of the century A. von Humboldt (1808) had already given these currents new impulses. Haeckel meant a new understanding of a field of work developing in biology, which considered the organism not only on its own, but also as embedded in a relationship between the nonliving (abiotic) and living (biotic) components of the environment (Haeckel, 1870). Some years earlier, in the treatise "General Morphology of Organisms" he had already defined the term Oecologie, which he linked exclusively with research into life-space interactions governed by natural laws, as the Naturhaushaltslehre (science of the nature household) (Haeckel, 1866).