The need to analyze ecological networks

Abstract

This volume arises out of the activities of two working groups organized under the auspices of the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR). The first, SCOR Working Group 59 on “Mathematical Models in Biological Oceanography” met in 1977, 1979 and 1982, under the co-chairmanship of Kenneth Mann and Trevor Platt. A book with the same title (Platt, Mann & Ulanowicz 1981) resulted from these meetings. In a nutshell, the group achieved some consensus that simulation modeling was a useful activity, but that simulation models of ecosystems had strict limitations: they were not predictive because qualitative changes of state often occurred in ecosystems, and these could at that time usually not be predicted or modeled. The group therefore resolved to explore the properties of ecosystems other than those revealed by simulation models. A theme which developed was that it is necessary to have at least as much information on the fluxes among the components of marine ecosystems as on the biomasses. This led in 1982 to a symposium reviewing knowledge of the “Flows of Energy and Materials in Marine Ecosystems”, organized in the NATO Advanced Research Institute series, the proceedings of which have been published (Fasham 1984). Here the theme persisted that there was a need to measure flows of energy and materials.