Bernard C. Patten

Ecosystems have connectivity

The web of life is an appropriate metaphor for living systems, whether they are ecological, anthropological, sociological, or some integrated combination, as most on earth now are. This phrase immediately forms the image of interactions and connectedness, both proximate and distal— a complex network of interacting parts, each playing off one another, providing constraints and opportunities for future behavior, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The interconnected systems are viewed as networks because of the powerful exploratory advantage present when employing the tools of network analysis—graph theory, matrix algebra, and simulation modeling, etc. Networks are comprised of a set of objects with direct transaction among these objects. Although, the exchange is a discrete transfer, these transactions are viewed in total link direct and indirect parts together in an interconnected web, giving rise to the network structure. This chapter deals with that connectivity, provides an overview of systems approaches, introduces quantitative methods of ecological network analysis to investigate this connectivity, and concludes with some of the general insight that is gained from viewing ecosystems as networks.

Ecosystems have complex dynamics – disturbance and decay

This chapter discusses the role of destructive processes for ecosystem dynamics. Destructive processes are focal components of the overall ecosystem adaptability, and they can be found on all relevant scales. The growth and development processes in ecosystems remain incomplete if disturbance and decay are not taken into account. The individual living components of ecosystems have limited life spans that range from minutes to millennia. Death and decay of organisms and their subsystems are integral elements of natural dynamics. From a functional viewpoint, these processes are advantageous to replace highly loaded or exhausted components or to adjust physiologies to changing environmental conditions. In addition, populations have limited durations at certain places on earth. While operating in a hierarchy of constraints, populations break down. Following the thermodynamic argumentation in this chapter, in these situations a modified collection of organisms may take over, to increase the internal flows and to reduce the energetic, material, and structural losses into the environment in a greater quantity than the predecessors. Therefore, breakdown is the consequent reaction if the living conditions of a community change strongly. Thereafter, new potentials can be realized and the orientor behavior can start again with renewed site conditions. Adopting this argumentation, natural disturbances seem to be crucial for the long-term self-organization, for the ecological creativity, and for the long-term integrity of ecological entities.

Ecosystems have ontic openness

The term “ontic” relates to the term ontology, which is used in philosophy to designate the way the world is viewed by a person and the way it is composed. Ontic bears the slight difference that it refers to intrinsic properties of the world as the way it is constructed and its behavior, such that it addresses phenomenology as well. Therefore, this chapter complements the concepts of thermodynamic openness addressed in the previous chapter, by including the physical openness available to ecosystem development. It relates directly to the theme of this book and the systemness of ecosystems because ontic openness results in the natural world to form novel patterns due to the complex web of life that constantly combines, interacts, and rearranges. In addition, ontic openness is a partial cause of indeterminacy and uncertainty in ecology and thus, it is the reason that does not allow making exact predictions or measurements with such a high accuracy, as for instance in physical experiments. Therefore, when understanding ecosystems from a systems perspective, the importance of physical openness cannot be overlooked.

Introduction: A new ecology is needed

The political agenda imposed on ecologists and environmental managers has changed, since the focus is shifted on sustainability, which inevitably has made ecosystem functioning a core issue. In view of the different contributions to global environmental degradation, states have common but differentiated responsibilities. The developed countries acknowledge the responsibility that they bear in the international pursuit of sustainable development, in view of the pressures their societies place on the global environment and of the technologies and financial resources that they command. Ecosystem services are the benefits that people obtain from ecosystems. These include provisioning services such a food and water; regulating services such as flood and disease control; cultural services such as spiritual, recreational, and cultural benefits; and supporting services such as nutrient cycling, which maintain the conditions for life on earth. Currently, environmental managers have realized that maintenance of ecosystem structure and functioning by an integrated approach is a prerequisite for a successful environmental management strategy, which is able to optimize the ecosystem services for the benefit of mankind and nature.

Ecosystem principles have broad explanatory power in ecology

The criticism that ecology as a whole lacks universal laws and predictive theory is frequent, and there are authors who even argue that theoretical ecology is concerned with fitness and natural selection is not scientific. Scientific observations on natural phenomena usually give origin to possible explanations and provide tentative generalizations that may lead to broad-scale comprehension of the available information. Generalizations may be descriptive and inductive, deriving from observations that are carried out on observable characteristics, or that become much more eager, constituting the base of deductive theories. This chapter examines the compliance of ecosystem principles to a number of ecological rules or laws, and sees if other proposed non-universal explanations that are provided by different authors about different ecological problems can be further enlightened according to the same ecological principles. It is demonstrated that ecosystem principles—namely, translated in the Ecological Law of Thermodynamics, are fully compliant with the evolutionary theory and also encompass some of the most well known non-universal ecological theories.

Ecosystem principles have applications

Orientors, being holistic ecological indicators, give extra information on the state of an ecosystem. Information coming from systematic or analytical approaches should never be neglected. Holistic indicators allow understanding whether the system under study is globally following a path that takes the system to a better or to a worse state. With indicator concepts, such as ecosystem health, ecosystem integrity can find operational values by using information coming from approaches such as network analysis, eco-energy, ascendency, energy evaluation, and other related indicators. This chapter presents d the up-to-date level of knowledge about the indicators that are used to compare characteristics and performance of different ecosystems, or of an ecosystem in time, more than to give absolute measures. These indicators cover a wide range of important properties of ecosystems for the evaluation of ecosystem health. The use of these indicators spans from agricultural to industrial systems, and from ecosystem management to ecological economics.

Ecosystems have openness (thermodynamic)

In accordance to classic thermodynamics, all isolated systems move towards thermodynamic equilibrium. All the gradients and structures in the system are eliminated and a homogenous dead system is the result. It is expressed thermodynamically as “entropy always increases in an isolated system.” Because work capacity is a result of gradients in certain intensive variables such as temperature, pressure, and chemical potential, a system at thermodynamic equilibrium can do no work. But the gardens are moving away from thermodynamic equilibrium with almost a faster and faster rate every year, which means that the gardens cannot be isolated. However, gardens as all other ecosystems must be open; they are first of all open to energy inputs from the solar radiation, which is absolutely necessary to avoid the system moving toward thermodynamic equilibrium. The energy contained in the solar radiation covers the energy needed for maintenance of the plants and animals, measured by the respiration, but when the demand for maintenance energy is covered, additional energy is used to move the system further away from thermodynamic equilibrium. The thermodynamic openness of ecosystems explains the reasons for moving away of ecosystems from thermodynamic equilibrium.

Ecosystems have directionality

Ecosystems have directionality. This chapter assumes much like the famed ergodic assumption in thermodynamics, that spatial series of biotic communities represents as well the temporal evolution of a single ecosystem. The second law of thermodynamics does indeed provide a direction for time and introduces history into science. The second law serves as a very significant constraint on the activities of living systems and imparts an undeniable directionality to biology Directionality, in the form of ecological succession, which is a key phenomenon in ecology from its inception. Ecological succession means the orderly process of community change, whereby communities replace one another in a given area. In those situations where the process is well known, the community at any given time may be recognized and future changes are predicted—that is, succession as a phenomenon appears to be reproducible to a degree. The direction of an ecosystem is determined by sources exterior to the system; the direction is both internal and constitutional. However, external events do impact the system direction by providing constraints, but any one event is usually incremental in effect. On rare occasions an external event can radically alter the direction and the constitution of the system itself, but this change is every bit as much a consequence of the system configuration as it is of the external event.