Ecological Systems as Complex Systems: Challenges for an Emerging Science

By Madhur Anand, Andrew Gonzalez, Frédéric Guichard, Jurek Kolasa, L. Parrott. 2010

127 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Complex systems science has contributed to our understanding of ecology in important areas such as food webs, patch dynamics and population fluctuations. This has been achieved through the use of simple measures that can capture the difference between order and disorder and simple models with local interactions that can generate surprising behaviour at larger scales. However, close examination reveals that commonly applied definitions of complexity fail to accommodate some key features of ecological systems, a fact that will limit the contribution of complex systems science to ecology. We highlight these features of ecological complexity—such as diversity, cross-scale interactions, memory and environmental variability—that continue to challenge classical complex systems science. Further advances in these areas will be necessary before complex systems science can be widely applied to understand the dynamics of ecological systems.

Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b366b7f2c23be3865acb06abf25590b580d761f1

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In Ecology

In Environmental Engineering

In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

REVIEW: Predictive ecology in a changing world (2015, background): “To meet this challenge, there is a need for mathematical, statistical and computational skills that extend beyond the range of standard ecological expertise towards unusual techniques likely to mix concepts of determinism and randomness that are usually considered independent (Anand et al. 2010).”