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Wikipedia:

Ecology is an interdisciplinary field that includes biology and Earth science.

I would really love to have a SE website where I could ask and answer questions about ecology. So I checked the Area 51 and found a proposal for Ecology SE. I thought that this is a great idea, subscribed and even asked a sample question (which is now a real question on Biology SE).

Is there a hypothesis that attempts to explain patterns of species richness along all three energy-related environmental gradients?

The reason I changed my mind is this post on Ecology SE, where the author argues:

After a long time of little movement on this project, I'm coming around to the idea that it's better to develop an active community of ecologists on the Biology StackExchange rather than try to develop an Ecology one. Having a critical mass of users is the essential thing, and its much easier to develop that on a beta site that's already active. Biology has "ecology" and "population biology" tags, and a slow but regular number of questions under them. I think followers of this project would do better by being active users there.


My question is what does Biology SE think about it, and whether this community would accept strictly ecological questions at least until there will be a huge community of both ecologists and biologists on Biology SE?

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    $\begingroup$ Also see my answer to your question at Ecology SE: discuss.area51.stackexchange.com/a/12934/87533. Ecology is clearly a subfield of Biology, and ecology questions here are fully on-topic. $\endgroup$ Commented Jan 15, 2014 at 11:37
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    $\begingroup$ I'm the author of the quote above. Thanks for the responses. I'm trying to drive more traffic to Biology SE by watching RSS feeds of the relevant tags, and sending/tweeting out questions to people who may know the answers. $\endgroup$
    – Noam Ross
    Commented Jan 15, 2014 at 17:43

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Throughout our time, we've striven to make Bio.SE as warm and welcoming a place as any on the StackExchange network, and for the most part I think we're doing a pretty good job. Biology isn't just about cells, medicine, pharmacology, and genetics, it's also about the world around us, how animals, plants, and other organisms interact, and larger interdisciplinary issues like evolution and development. Questions in all of these areas are currently considered on-topic for Biology, and I wouldn't mind more about ecology and related studies. currently has 76 questions tagged, while and currently have 27 combined. Not being an ecologist, I'm not quite sure what other tags to look at, but it seems we have certainly have enough for a good beginning right there. If the Ecology.SE Area51 proposal truly isn't going to get off the ground, I feel we should welcome them here as true biologists.

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Ecology is part of biology, so, of course ecology questions are welcome. Each question has a link, and we encourage you to spread those links to help grow the community.

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