Ecology

Ecology on Cicerone looks at living systems under stress: forests, biodiversity, thermodynamics of life, and the feedbacks between climate and the biosphere. Posts mix primary literature with longer essays on extinction risk and the economics of nature.

Featured reading includes elevated CO2 as a pollutant for humans and ecosystems, warming effects on net primary productivity, Dasgupta on biodiversity economics, forests as planetary cooling systems, and mass extinction framed in deep time. Related work on metabolic scaling and non-equilibrium thermodynamics sits nearby.

For biodiversity loss timelines and restoration goals, see also posts tagged Biodiversity such as Halting Biodiversity Loss. Use the featured list for durable science threads, then the full archive for everything filed under Ecology.

Watch for where ecological limits collide with political and economic incentives. Scale matters: a local forest story and a planetary carbon budget can belong to the same problem set even when they appear in different papers.