Ethnoecology is the scientific study of how different groups of people living in different locations understand the ecosystems around them, and their relationships with surrounding environments. It seeks valid, reliable understanding of how we as humans have interacted with the environment and how these intricate relationships have been sustained over time. The "ethno" (see ethnology) prefix in ethnoecology indicates a localized study of a people, and in conjunction with ecology, signifies people's understanding and experience of environments around them. Ecology is the study of the interactions between living organisms and their environment; enthnoecology applies a human focused approach to this subject. The development of the field lies in applying indigenous knowledge of botany and placing it in a global context. History Ethnoecology began with some of the early works of Dr. Hugh Popenoe, an agronomist and tropical soil scientist who has worked with the University of Florida, the National Science Foundation, and the National Research Council. Popenoe has also worked with Dr Harold Conklin, a cognitive anthropologist who did extensive linguistic and ethnoecological research in Southeast Asia. In his 1954 dissertation "The Relation of the Hanunoo Culture to the Plant World", Harold Conklin coined the term ethnoecology when he described his approach as "ethnoecological". After earning his PhD, he began teaching at Columbia University while continuing his research among the Hanunoo. In 1955, Conklin published one of his first ethnoecological studies. His "Hanunoo Color Categories" study helped scholars understand the relationship between classification systems and conceptualization of the world within cultures. In this experiment, Conklin discovered that people in various cultures recognize colors differently due to their unique classification system. Within his results he found that the Hanunoo uses two levels of colors. The first level consists of four basic terms of colors:; darkness, lightness, redness, and greenness. While, the second level was more abstract and consisted of hundreds of color classifications such as: texture, shininess, and moisture of objects also were used to classify objects. Other anthropologists had a hard time understanding this color classification system because they often applied their own idea of color criteria to those of the Hanunoo. Conklin's studies were not only the breakthrough of ethnoecology, but they also helped develop the idea that other cultures conceptualize the world in their own terms, which helped to reduce ethnocentric views of those in western cultures. Other scholars such as Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven endeavored to learn