Abstract: Urban ecology has gradually developed to a commonly confirmed branch of ecology, but the conceptual framework of village ecology has not be constructed. In this paper, village ecology is defined as a branch of ecology which studies the formation, structure and behavior of village as well as the objective entity of it and its environmental background. Village is a space settlement unit of human with the features of definite age structure and population, household as its composition unit, land as management object, and corresponding living things (livestock and crop) as main valued resources. Apart from spacial and biological meaning, village relates directly to landscape elements and resource indexes such as geological locality, topography, climate, soil and vegetation. Meanwhile, village is connected with many other complicated factors,e.g., historical tradition, social custom, and so on. The significance of village ecology is to reveal the relationship between village and all its related factors,and to guide the rural construction.

Key words: Village, Village ecology