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Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science

Definition of the Subject

Ecological systems are paradigmatic examples of complex systems. Just think about thethousands of species interacting in complex ways within rich communities such as tropicalrainforests or coral reefs. The most pressing questions ecologists face deal with conceptssuch as stability, resilience, thresholds and non‐linearities which are at the core ofthe sciences of complexity. How robust are these cathedrals of biodiversity? At which ratewill they disassemble as a consequence of global change ? For example, one of the long‐standing questions in ecologyis the relationship between complexity and stability. This contribution will presenta brief review of some of the applications of the complexity sciences into the realm ofecological systems and discuss the implications for our understanding ofecosystems. Predicting the consequences of global change on biodiversity and the services itprovides will need an interdisciplinary approach in which...

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Abbreviations

Food webs:

Networks depicting who eats whom in an ecological community.

Compartments:

Groups of highly interacting nodes with few connections to nodes from other groups.

Scale-free networks:

Very heterogeneous networks in which the bulk of nodes have a few links, but a few nodes have a very large number of links.

Mutualistic networks:

Two-mode networks depicting the mutually beneficial interactions between plants and their pollinators or seed dispersers.

Connectivity correlation:

A measure of network structure that represents the correlation between the number of interactions of a node and the average number of interactions of the nodes it interacts with. A negative connectivity correlation would represent a modular network.

Species strength:

A measure of the importance of a species in terms of the total weight of its connections.

Network motifs:

Patterns of interconnections significantly over‐represented in complex networks. These may be regarded as the simple building blocks of complex networks.

Trophic cascades:

Changes in population abundance that propagate through more than one trophic link in the food chain.

Ecosystem shifts:

Sudden qualitative changes in the state of an ecosystem (i. e., from clear to turbid waters in a lake) following a continuous tuning of a variable such as nutrient load.

Deterministic chaos:

A periodic, random‐like time series generated by low dimensional, non‐linear, deterministic models.

Lyapunov exponent:

A measure of the degree of divergence of initially close trajectories in the phase space that is characteristic of deterministic chaos.

Coupled map lattice:

Dynamical system with discrete time, discrete space, and continuous state. It was first used by the physicist Kunihiko Kaneko in relation to spatiotemporal chaos and later on used in ecology as a model of spatiotemporal systems.

Interacting particle system:

Stochastic spatial models with discrete time, discrete space, and finite states. They have been used as spatially extended models of populations and epidemics, and have been widely analyzed by Richard Durrett and Simon Levin.

Metapopulation:

A population of populations maintained in a dynamical balance between local extinctions and recolonizations from nearby local populations.

Extinction thresholds:

Critical values in the amount of habitat destroyed at which a metapopulation goes extinct.

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  1. Integrative Ecology Group, Estación Biológica de Doñana, CSIC, Seville, Spain

    Jordi Bascompte

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  1. RAMTECH LIMITED, 122 Escalle Lane, Larkspur, CA, 94939, USA

    Robert A. Meyers Ph. D. (Editor-in-Chief) (Editor-in-Chief)

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Bascompte, J. (2009). Ecological Systems. In: Meyers, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30440-3_163

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