Few names in this literature have accumulated as many separate identities, and almost none of them are connected to each other.
In the Hebrew Bible, Ariel appears in Isaiah 29 as a designation for Jerusalem, in a passage of judgement; the word is variously read as lion of God or as altar hearth, and the two readings pull in different directions. It also appears in Ezra 8 as a personal name, and in 2 Samuel in a phrase about warriors whose sense is disputed.
In the seventy-two, Ariel is the forty-sixth, governing five degrees of Scorpio. Crucially, the standard lists write it with an initial ayin, where the biblical Ariel has an aleph. In Hebrew these are different words. The identity exists only in English.
In the later magical and occult literature Ariel turns up repeatedly and in incompatible roles: as a name in Gnostic material, as a spirit in various grimoires, as an angel of the elements in nineteenth and twentieth-century angelology, and, in the most widely known modern treatment, as an archangel of nature and animals. That last is very recent, belongs to popular angel publishing of the late twentieth century onward, and has no textual root in any of the earlier occurrences.
Shakespeare's Ariel in The Tempest, an airy spirit, is a further and independent branch.
The attribute given to the forty-sixth in modern lists, nature and environmental connection, almost certainly reflects the popular archangel rather than anything in the derivation. It is a case of a recent identification feeding back into an older list, and it is worth naming as such, because it is a live example of the process that produced most of the rest of the apparatus.