Noun

The branch of biology dealing with the relationships of organisms with their environment and with each other.

* 1949 - Bruce Kiskaddon, George R. Stewart

As a graduate student, he was working on a thesis: The Ecology of the Black Creek Area . He had to investigate the relationships, past and present, of men and plants and animals in this region.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2012-01

, author=Robert M. Pringle , title=How to Be Manipulative , volume=100, issue=1, page=31 , magazine= citation , passage=As in much of biology, the most satisfying truths in ecology derive from manipulative experimentation. Tinker with nature and quantify how it responds.}}

Noun

(en noun)

The surroundings of, and influences on, a particular item of interest.

The natural world or ecosystem.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-07, author=David Simpson

, volume=188, issue=26, page=36, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly) , title= Fantasy of navigation , passage=It is tempting to speculate about the incentives or compulsions that might explain why anyone would take to the skies in [the] basket [of a balloon]: […];  […]; or perhaps to muse on the irrelevance of the borders that separate nation states and keep people from understanding their shared environment .}}

All the elements over which a designer has no control and that affect a system or its inputs and outputs.

A particular political or social setting, arena or condition.

(computing) The software and/or hardware existing on any particular computer system.

(programming) The environment of a function at a point during the execution of a program is the set of identifiers in the function's scope and their bindings at that point.

(computing) The set of variables and their values in a namespace that an operating system associates with a process.