The paper aims at demonstrating how exploratory voyages in the Russian empire formed the basis for accumulating data on the relations between animals and their environment, their behaviour in animal communities, and how this process led to the making of a new discipline.
Those naturalists who took part in the 2nd Kamchatka expedition (1733-1743) and the expeditions organised by the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1768-1774 carried out their research within the framework of natural history, however their travel journals and treatises contain some data that can be retrospectively considered as proto-ecological. From this perspective it is particularly interesting to examine Peter Pallas’s studies on rodents and the work done by G. Steller (1751) who for the first time in Russia provided a complex description of animals’ natural habitats and who suggested that animals’ traits and behaviour could have an adaptive value. The territory of Russia provided scholars and travellers with a unique opportunity to study animal species in different geographic zones and eco-systems, to analyse their migrations and their population dynamics, their adaptability to abiotic factors, the specificities of their biological niches and the impact exercised by these niches on nutrition, geographic and seasonal variability, distribution areas etc.

In the studies produced in the 1830s-1850s by E.A. Eversmann, K. E. Von Baer, A.F. Middendorf, N.A. Severtsov, the issues of proto-ecology and animal geography were still merged with other problem fields of biology. In this period a great role was played by exploratory voyages organised by Russian state administration, universities, learned societies and local authorities who were interested in environmental data for pragmatic reasons – it was hoped that these data could be useful for devising the means of protection against pests, parasites, disease carriers, or for rationalization of fisheries or hunt. All these issues required increasing attention to the study of animal life cycles and their distribution areas.

In the 1860s-1890s the basis was laid for the making of applied ichthyology (N.Ya. Danilevsky, K.F. Kessler, O.A. von Grimm), ecology of pest insects (F.P. Koeppen), ecology of parasites (I.I. Mechnikov, A.P. Fedchenko), ecology of game and forest animals (A.A. Silant’ev), etc. New methods of estimating population size were developed. The formation of animal ecology was made possible by progressive differentiation of various branches of zoology.