Nature (natural world)

Nature is the physical world, including living organisms, nonliving matter, and the processes that shape them, considered apart from human artifice.

Biodiversity: The variety of life across genes, species, and ecosystems. It captures the variety of living forms within the natural world.
Natural selection: The process by which heritable traits become more or less common through differences in reproductive success. It explains how populations change without deliberate design.
Conservation biology: The scientific study of protecting biological diversity and preventing species loss. It applies ecological knowledge to protect species and ecosystems.
Culture: The shared practices, meanings, institutions, and material expressions learned within human groups. It names a major domain often distinguished from the natural world.
Romanticism: An artistic and intellectual movement that emphasized emotion, imagination, and the power of nature. It helped establish nature as a source of awe and spiritual insight.
Ecosystem: A community of organisms interacting with one another and their physical environment. It shows how living organisms and nonliving surroundings form interacting systems.
Ecological succession: The change in an ecological community’s composition and structure over time. It traces how communities reorganize after disturbance or on newly exposed ground.
Ecological restoration: The practice of assisting the recovery of damaged, degraded, or destroyed ecosystems. It uses knowledge of natural processes to help ecosystems recover.
Anthropocene: A proposed geological epoch defined by the pervasive influence of human activity on Earth systems. It challenges a clean separation between human activity and planetary processes.
Environmental ethics: The philosophical study of moral relationships between humans and the natural environment. It asks what obligations people have toward nonhuman life and ecological systems.

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