ABSTRACT
Ecology is the study of the relationship between organisms and the environment and the interrleationships between organisms. The response of an organism to the environment is determined by the effects of the environment on the processes in the organism. Stated in another way, all environmental factors affect the growth and distribution of organisms only by affecting rates of processes in the organisms. The study of the effects of environmental factors on processes in organisms is physiological ecology, or in other words, it is the study of the physiological basis of ecological behavior. This field obviously represents a marriage between ecology and physiology, and is sometimes called environmental physiology. The field of physiological ecology is extremely broad: thus, this paper is restricted to certain aspects of physiological plant ecology.
