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Ecosemiotics studies the role of environmental perception and conceptual categorization in the design, construction, and transformation of environmental structures. This article provides a brief review of the history of ecosemiotics, and formulates eight core principles of the ecosemiotic approach. The ecosemiotic view understands humans as capable of both prelinguistic (biosemiotic) and linguistic (cultural) modelling of their environment. Accordingly, the diversity of structures is, to a certain extent, resultant of the types of semioses partaking in their formation. Ecosemiotics could provide geography with conceptual tools to describe the role of signs and communication in the dynamics of physical environments.

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In biosemiotics, living beings are not conceived of as the passive result of anonymous selection pressures acted upon through the course of evolution. Rather, organisms are considered active participants that influence, shape and re-shape other organisms, the surrounding environment, and eventually also their own constitutional and functional integrity. The traditional Darwinian division between natural and sexual selection seems insufficient to encompass the richness of these processes, particularly in light of recent knowledge on communicational processes in the realm of life. Here, we introduce the concepts of semiotic selection and semiotic co-option which in part represent a reinterpretation of classical biological terms and, at the same time, keep explanations sensitive to semiosic processes taking place in living nature. We introduce the term 'semiotic selection' to emphasize the fact that actions of different semiotic subjects (selectors) will produce qualitatively different selection pressures. Thereafter, 'semiotic co-option' explains how semiotic selection may shape appearance in animals through remodelling existing forms and relations. Considering the event of co-option followed by the process of semiotic selection enables us to describe the evolution of semantic organs.Evolutionary topics are central for contemporary biology. And yet, the role of organisms as living subjects in evolution is generally neglected. Biological organisms are rather considered only as being subjected to physical or anonymous