what does ecology mean 

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Ecology (from Greek: ?????, oikos, "household"; and ?????, logos, "knowledge") is the scientific study of the distribution and abundance of living organisms and how the distribution and abundance are affected by interactions between the organisms and their environment. The environment of an organism includes both physical properties, which can be described as the sum of local abiotic factors such as insolation (sunlight), climate, and geology, and biotic factors, which are other organisms that share its habitat. The word "ecology" is often used more loosely in such terms as social ecology and deep ecology and in common parlance as a synonym for the natural environment or environmentalism. Likewise "ecologic" or "ecological" is often taken in the sense of environmentally friendly. The term oekologie was coined in 1866 by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel.Ecology is usually considered a branch of biology, the general science that studies living organisms. Organisms can be studied at many different levels, from proteins and nucleic acids (in biochemistry and molecular biology), to cells (in cellular biology), to individuals (in botany, zoology, and other similar disciplines), and finally at the level of populations, communities, and ecosystems, to the biosphere as a whole; these latter strata are the primary subjects of ecological inquiry. Ecology is a multi-disciplinary science. Because of its focus on the higher levels of the organization of life on earth and on the interrelations between organisms and their environment, ecology draws heavily on many other branches of science, especially geology and geography, meteorology, pedology, genetics, chemistry, and physics. Thus, ecology is considered by some to be a holistic science, one that over-arches older disciplines such as biology which in this view become sub-disciplines contributing to ecological knowledge. Agriculture, fisheries, forestry, medicine and urban development are among human activities that would fall within Krebs’ (1972: 4) explanation of his definition of ecology: where organisms are found, how many occur there, and why. As a scientific discipline, ecology does not dictate what is "right" or "wrong". However, ecological knowledge such as the quantification of biodiversity and population dynamics have provided a scientific basis for expressing the aims of environmentalism and evaluating its goals and policies. Additionally, a holistic view of nature is stressed in both ecology and environmentalism. Consider the ways an ecologist might approach studying the life of honeybees: * The behavioral relationship between individuals of a species is behavioral ecology — for example, the study of the queen bee, and how she relates to the worker bees and the drones. * The organized activity of a species is community ecology; for example, the activity of bees assures the pollination of flowering plants. Bee hives additionally produce honey which is consumed by still other species, such as bears.* The relationship between the environment and a species is environmental ecology — for example, the consequences of environmental change on bee activity. Bees may die out due to environmental changes (see pollinator decline). The environment simultaneously affects and is a consequence of this activity and is thus intertwined with the survival of the species.   The initials, NBSP, can stand for many things. Some things it can stand for are Narrow Band Signal Power, National Biometric Security Project or Non Breaking Space which is used in HTML language.                            or  When browsing the web, you may occasionally run into pages that have  somwhere in their text. You may even see mutiple &nbsp's grouped toegether. Admittedly, this looks pretty odd, but there is a good explanation for it. NBSP stands for "No-break space." In HTML, the language Web pages are created with, a space is read the same as two, ten, or one hundred spaces. So if you want to put more than one space between two words or two objects on a Web page, you need to use a no-break space. The HTML code for a no-break space is  . So to make "this phrase" turn into "this      phrase," several &nbsp's need to be inserted between "this" and "phrase" in the HTML. Sometimes, the HTML on a Web page is written incorrectly, or no-break spaces are not supported by a certain website, such as a public discussion board. In these cases, you will sometimes see the actual &nbsp code instead of the extra white space you should be seeing.