Open systems navigation based on system-level difference analysis - Case studies with urban augmented ecosystems

Abstract

Complex systems in the real world, such as ecosystems, comprise a large number of interacting components and are exposed to an open environment under dominant external influence, which makes it difficult to set the reference for the measurement of information needed to manage the system. Here we propose a novel methodology to address the reproducibility and objectivity of measurement in such open systems situations, taking examples with ecosystem management in urban green infrastructure.Through the implementation of three biodiversity operations, we obtained 350 variables based on the subjective and objective measurements from two urban ecosystems, concerning the aboveground plant diversity and belowground soil state. Using PCA, we distinguished the effective responses to the biodiversity operations from environmental baseline drift and other marginal fluctuation in terms of the degree of correlation. We then analyzed the commonality of the responses and classified the variables by generating two categories of indices with different levels of consistency. Supported by a given diversity of the variables, significant 69 subjective and 11 objective measures were successfully extracted as consistent indices of operation response, which provided effective interpretation of the system-level changes through the model as an integrated plant-soil relationship.Additionally, we investigated the possibility to replace invasive measurements with non-invasive ones through the construction of proxies with the regression analysis, which showed that the combinations of mainly subjective measures could find significant regression of all16 objectives but invasive indices, in a compatible way with known ecological mechanisms. The utilization of untapped potential of subjective measures would lead to synergistic amelioration of human ecological literacy and cost-efficiency of the ecosystem management.The overall results imply the possibility to navigate urban green infrastructure to a more diverse range of augmented ecosystems, with scientific support for the detection of system-level differences that have been usually buried in the open-field complexity.