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What is "ecological"

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ecological
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
ecological
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
an ecological/environmental disaster (=causing great damage to nature)
▪ This region is facing an ecological disaster as a result of toxic waste.
ecological footprint
the ecological balance
▪ Human activity is ruining the ecological balance of our planet.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
approach
▪ New ecological approaches sought to help us understand human adaptation to the environment.
▪ Cowles developed an ecological approach within an academic framework that stressed rigorous pure research.
▪ We have already seen how pioneers of the ecological approach forged an alliance with specialists from the environmental sciences.
balance
▪ What of our own ecological balance sheet for the trees?
▪ In general landowners were expected to work the land and to increase productivity, but not to upset the ecological balance.
▪ The ecological balance in the area could be destroyed.
▪ The effluents we pour heedlessly into its waters are a threat to its delicate ecological balance.
▪ They harvest its riches without destroying the ecological balance.
▪ Factory-farming makes pollution, excessive meat-eating upsets the ecological balance, trapping and hunting can injure habitat, and so on.
▪ Researchers believe that the ecological balance was upset by the decision to introduce the Nile perch into the lake in 1960.
catastrophe
▪ Environmental protection Overpopulation in the Majority World has often been blamed for ecological catastrophe.
▪ If they do this, ecological catastrophe is inevitable.
crisis
▪ The challenges of hunger, of poverty, of ecological crisis.
▪ And that has worsened the overall ecological crisis that engine efficiency was originally meant to solve.
▪ In part, McKenna sees this as a natural reaction to the ecological crisis brought on by the modern era.
▪ Yet the people targeted by them still live with economic stagnation, political repression, malnutrition and ecological crisis.
damage
▪ The legacy of the Duvalierist years included endemic corruption and vast ecological damage.
▪ Some of these carry toxic cargoes and an accident could result in economic as well as ecological damage.
disaster
▪ But if they do not leave, he said, ecological disaster could be as little as five or 10 years away.
▪ Rampart Dam, however, was an ecological disaster probably with-out precedent in the world.
▪ In sum, our nation was headed toward ecological disaster.
▪ Ben has adapted his zany thriller about ecological disaster and will play the lead.
▪ Then there was Nordhausen - an industrial centre which was an ecological disaster.
▪ But it's also a story of ecological disaster and man's excess.
▪ Tex Slampacker was referring to yet another man-made ecological disaster.
impact
▪ Clearly, a better understanding of long term ecological impact needs to be encouraged.
issue
▪ The growing awareness of environmental and ecological issues often coincides with traditional beliefs and practices.
niche
▪ This in turn has led to rapid evolution to fill the vacant or new ecological niches.
▪ Some thing or things have to happen for a microbe to escape its previously harmless ecological niche and reach critical mass.
▪ By contrast, the appeal of the industrial co-operative remains unchallengeable, its ecological niche exclusive to it.
▪ It is an organism that has taken advantage of a man-made ecological niche, created in buildings' water systems.
▪ Fewer plants equate to fewer ecological niches and fewer species of animals to fill them.
▪ Old ecological niches were destroyed in the process and new ones opened up.
problem
▪ How our sensibilities in regard to social and ecological problems have evolved over the last 40 years.
▪ Paradoxically the ecological problems deriving from the application of artificial fertilizers are often equally complex and extensive.
▪ The basic ecological problem of limited resources remains.
▪ Both are concerned to overcome the ecological problem by using biotechnology.
▪ The ecological problem forced itself on to our consciousness.
▪ Creative solutions to our ecological problems?
▪ We know that there is an ecological problem.
system
▪ The second is to gain the knowledge and experience to maintain humans within equilibrium in a closed ecological system.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ The government is to provide incentives for people to protect natural ecological assets such as forests.
▪ There are warnings that the building of the dam will upset the ecological balance of the river basin.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ As dump opponents had feared, it explicitly sidesteps many of the ecological concerns raised last fall by Park Service scientists.
▪ But in ecological terms, something catastrophic had occurred.
▪ Each team works in 3 villages of a chosen ecological and cultural region, with 8 months in each of the villages.
▪ Ecotopian biotechnology on the contrary would possess an infrastructure based firstly on ecological rationality and secondarily on an economic basis.
▪ Previous studies have assessed the amenity role of countryside open-spaces using separate ecological, landscape and recreational criteria.
▪ Rampart Dam, however, was an ecological disaster probably with-out precedent in the world.
▪ This recognition has had a major impact, not only in the ecological field but also in that of Earth Mysteries.
▪ We could conceivably escape disaster, but we seem destined, absent real change, for ecological impoverishment.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
ecological

ecological \ecological\ ([-e]*k[-o]"l[o^]j"[i^]*kal), adj. of or pertaining to ecology; as, an ecological disaster.

Syn: bionomic, bionomical.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
ecological

1899, see ecology + -ical. Related: Ecologically.

Wiktionary
ecological

a. Relating to ecology, the interrelationships of organisms and their environment.

Related phrases:
WordNet
ecological

  1. adj. characterized by the interdependence of living organisms in an environment; "an ecological disaster" [syn: ecologic]

  2. of or relating to the science of ecology; "ecological research" [syn: ecologic, bionomical, bionomic]

Related phrases:
Wikipedia
Related phrases:

Usage examples of "ecological".

The few deer, pheasant, turkey, squirrels, rabbits, and the like had multiplied to the point where some hunting was allowed, and as with all the Anchors, there was a complex ecological chain involving insects, birds, and many other creatures, not all of which were nice for or to humans but all of which were necessary to keep the system in some sort of balance.

Some continental examples of ecological sinks include extremely desertified areas, bodies of water where eutrophication has used up the oxygen, and lakes killed by acid rain.

Where the Marxists tended to reduce all concerns to the material exchanges of the physiosphere, the Greens tend to reduce all concerns to the ecological exchanges of the biosphere.

He tried to create an ecological catastrophe by dumping Kuwaiti oil into the Persian Gulf.

The nontropical nocturnal ecological niches may have been almost un-tenanted in the Triassic Period, some two hundred million years ago.

Boyle remembered how, in an earlier age, Salley had gone on and on about the waterbushes and what a significant ecological development they were.

Mariella gives several seminars on her work on the Chi and the virus that the Chinese engineered to try to destroy it, and sits in the audience and listens to presentations by others on the ecological damage caused by the slicks and on DNA sequences published on the Internet, speculative papers on possible selective agents against the slicks, and on what is known about the chemical agents both the Chinese and American governments have used, either with little success or with massive collateral damage to the ecosystems they were trying to protect.

Man himself would not have survived long, but a number of subbranches might have evolved to fit different ecological niches.

This is the general area of the natural and ecological sciences, the life sciences, the systems sciences, and we will explore each of them carefully.

And the empirical systems sciences or ecological sciences, even though they claim to be holistic, in fact cover exactly and only one half of the Kosmos.

The exhibits were devoted to Europan biota, most of which depended on the ecological niches of the hydrothermal vents, carefully reproduced here.

Which of these two tendencies wins in particular societies depends on details of cultural circumstance, just as in different animal species it depends on ecological details.

Everything is going into the growth of the slick, and as it displaces the normal phytoplankton population, it will remove the base of the ecological pyramid through which fixed carbon flows from the microscopic primary producers to zooplankton, fish, squid, whales, and, ultimately, man.

In so doing, they created an ecological catastrophe and destroyed the way of life of several hundred thousand Marsh Arabs who had made their homes among the rushes and reeds for more than a millennium.

The intricate ecological relationships of herbivores and carnivores, of predators and prey, built up over a hundred and fifty million years, had utterly collapsed.