Abstract: This series of papers is prepared to develop systematically the complicated dynamical behaviors of nonlinear ecosystem and its internal mechanism. In this paper, we state briefly the increasing importance of ecology, describe and comment on the situations and reasons why ecology theory is behind practice. Then, we point out a procedure which modern ecology research should obey, and discuss the four basic characteristics of ecosystem in detail: level, opening, nonlinear and far from equilibrium. At last, we discuss systematically equilibrium and nonequilibrium, stable and unstable, environmental stochasticity and dynamical stochasticity, and conclude that there exists a bridge between deterministic behaviors and stochastic behaviors, which will result in a new model for ecological prediction.