Ecology or ecological science is the study of the relationship of plants and animals to their physical and biological environment. It is a scientific study of the distribution and abundance of living organisms and how these properties are affected by interactions between the organisms and their environment. The environment of an organism includes both the physical properties, which can be described as the sum of local abiotic factors like solar insolation, climate and geology, as well as the other organisms that share its habitat. Hence it is a synthetic branch of science which obtains source materials from several other disciplines like climatology, geography, geology, limnology, mathematics, physics, chemistry, microbiology besides other branches of biology. Therefore, ecology deals with the study of interaction of living beings among themselves as well as their physical environment.