Ecosystem
The term ecosystem was first used in 1935 in a publication by British ecologist Arthur Tansley. Tansley devised the concept to draw attention to the importance of transfers of materials between organisms and their environment. He later refined the term, describing it as "The whole system, ... including not only the organism-complex, but also the whole complex of physical factors forming what we call the environment". Tansley regarded ecosystems not simply as natural units, but as "mental isolates". Tansley later defined the spatial extent of ecosystems using the term ecotope.
Historical ecology
The idea of the cultural landscape is directly attributed to American geographer Carl Sauer. Sauer's theories developed as a critique of environmental determinism, which was a popular theory in the early twentieth century. Sauer's pioneering 1925 paper "The Morphology of Landscape" is now fundamental to many disciplines and defines the domain. In this, the term landscape is used in a geographical sense to mean an arbitrarily selected section of reality; morphology means the conceptual and methodological processes for altering it. Hence to Sauer, wherever humans lived and impacted the environment, landscapes with determinate histories resulted.