Ecology is the scientific study of the distribution and abundance of organisms, and how those organisms interact with each other and with their environment, which includes both living (e.g. competitors for food) and non-living (e.g. atmospheric nitrogen) components. Ecology relies upon and builds upon natural history, the careful observation and description of natural phenomenon but, as a science, ecology seeks to explain those observations in a way that allows extrapolation to novel situations. Ecological questions often cannot be addressed in the same way that scientists would address other types of questions. In hypothetico-deductive scientific enquiry, carefully designed experiments are conducted so that empirical data can be used to reject alternative hypotheses until only one likely explanation is still plausible. However, in ecological research there are often too many uncontrollable variables for rigorous control and experimentation, so variables may interact in ways that…