Sensory Ecology

Sensory ecology is the study of how organisms acquire, process, and respond to environmental information through sensory systems, and how these sensory modalities co-evolve with the environmental structures that shape them. It treats perception not as a passive reception of stimuli but as an active process of niche construction: organisms modify their environments (beavers alter stream acoustics, forests filter light spectra) and their sensory systems adapt to these modifications. The field bridges acoustic ecology, visual ecology, and chemical ecology, unifying them under the framework of information extraction in ecological contexts. Sensory ecology reveals that habitat degradation is not merely a loss of physical resources but a degradation of the information landscape on which organisms depend. See Sensory Drive.