Table 1.

Contrasts between biogeography and ecology. Descriptors of each discipline are acknowledged to be stereotypical categorizations having many exceptions. Ecology here refers to modern organismal, population and community ecology, and sets aside ecosystem and global ecology as operating at a different hierarchical level that is more focused on biogeochemistry and energetics (e.g. carbon cycles) than organisms and populations per se.

attribute	biogeography	ecology
spatial scales	global to regional	regional to local
temporal scales	millions to thousands of years	generation times to population cycles
fundamental units of study	clades, species, ranges, distributions	individuals, populations, communities
fundamental processes of interest	speciation, extinction, range expansion or contraction	abiotic and biotic interactions that affect density or distribution
adjectives describing fundamental methods	descriptive, correlative, phylogenetic	experimental, correlative, replicated
example questions	what geological events best explain clade distributions? why are species distributed as they are? where has speciation or extinction occurred, and when?	why do populations increase or decrease? how do species interact, and does that change with environmental context? what factors best correlate with species diversity?