What if we studied the indoors as an environment all its own?

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Another take on indoor environments... What if we studied the indoors as an environment all its own?

A growing movement argues it's time to rethink our assumptions about what an environment is and give our the

indoors the same scrutiny we give nature....Microbiologists are now teaming up with architects, engineers, and indoor air researchers to start to better understand the ecosystems that

surround us every day, and whose contents are largely invisible to the eye.

The "indoor ecology'' movement is a fairly young phenomenon, but it

is already starting to yield a picture that's surprisingly intricate and diverse: A cubic centimeter of indoor air contains a thousand tiny pieces of solid or liquid material; a similar volume of house dust is a landscape of fibers, pollen, skin, and hair. Besides ourselves, and our pets, and our plants, this crowded environment is home to an ecosystem of microbial life — bacteria, fungi, viruses —- that float freely or form tightly knit communities on surfaces and objects. And their lives are shaped by building materials, furniture, and the indoor climate — light, moisture, temperature, and the movements of air.

"We know so little about this system as a complex ecosystem,'' says Hal Levin, a research architect with the Building Ecology Research Group in California, who argues that we should see buildings not as static objects, but dynamic environments that change over time....Increasingly, scientists are realizing that microbial communities are just as rich in the built environment as they are outdoors. The concept has gotten a boost from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,

which over the past few years has devoted more than $20 million to fund

dozens of studies on microbes in the indoor environment....http://www.mnn.com/health/healthy-spaces/stories/what-if-we-studied-the-indoors-as-an-environment-all-its-own