The phrase "ecological settings" is perfectly correct and usable in written English.
You can use the phrase when referring to the external environment in which living organisms exist, as well as the conditions that result from the interaction of organisms with their environment. For example: "The southern pine beetle has had a devastating impact on pine trees in the southern United States due to changing ecological settings."
However, this is likely because the multi-factor approach used by the USNVC based on species composition, disturbance history, and ecological settings does not correspond to a single set of drivers across the region.
Gift exchange such as the potlatch of the Northwest Pacific coast Indians has also been analyzed as an adaptive subsistence aspect of a socioeconomic system allowing for redistribution of surplus wealth and food in certain ecological settings.
Prior to the Toba eruption, drying of local ecological settings was underway.
However, no study has focused on the fine temporal brain activations during a bimanual coordinative task in ecological settings.
Together, rice and foxtail millet formed a diversified food strategy and a risk resistant package which was adjustable to different ecological settings.
Landform effects on water availability in protected areas and human activities under different ecological settings were seemingly responsible for the large functional diversity of the region.
The juxtaposition of ecological settings with human values generated sharp tradeoffs, especially with respect to community wildfire protection versus generating revenue to support restoration and fire protection activities.
Incorporating these physiological mechanisms into the design and interpretation of ecological studies will make these increasingly popular studies of stress in ecological settings more rigorous.
In many cases this demands a transboundary approach, when the potential distribution of an invasive species covers two or more neighbouring countries or federal regions, a situation common in many ecological settings (Dallimer and Strange 2015).
The invasive species can do so through many mechanisms (Levine et al., 2003), and the role of urbanisation-driven changes in ecological settings to influence such mechanisms is yet poorly understood.
Because the empirical classification did not explicitly incorporate environmental conditions, and because the USNVC classification is based in part on environmental conditions and ecological settings, it is somewhat surprising that prediction of the empirical classification was best.
