Systems Ecology - Overview

Overview

Systems ecology seeks a holistic view of the interactions and transactions within and between biological and ecological systems. Systems ecologists realise that the function of any ecosystem can be influenced by human economics in fundamental ways. They have therefore taken an additional transdisciplinary step by including economics in the consideration of ecological-economic systems. In the words of R.L. Kitching:

• Systems ecology can be defined as the approach to the study of ecology of organisms using the techniques and philosophy of systems analysis: that is, the methods and tools developed, largely in engineering, for studying, characteriszing and making predictions about complex entities, that is, systems..
• In any study of an ecological system, an essential early procedure is to draw a diagram of the system of interest ... diagrams indicate the system's boundaries by a solid line. Within these boundaries, series of components are isolated which have been chosen to represent that portion of the world in which the systems analyst is interested ... If there are no connections across the systems' boundaries with the surrounding systems environments, the systems are described as closed. Ecological work, however, deals almost exclusively with open systems.

As a mode of scientific enquiry, a central feature of Systems Ecology is the general application of the principles of energetics to all systems at any scale. Perhaps the most notable proponent of this view was Howard T. Odum - sometimes considered the father of ecosystems ecology. In this approach the principles of energetics constitute ecosystem principles. Reasoning by formal analogy from one system to another enables the Systems Ecologist to see principles functioning in an analogous manner across system-scale boundaries. H.T. Odum commonly used the Energy Systems Language as a tool for making systems diagrams and flow charts.

The fourth of these principles, the principle of maximum power efficiency, takes central place in the analysis and synthesis of ecological systems. The fourth principle suggests that the most evolutionarily advantageous system function occurs when the environmental load matches the internal resistance of the system. The further the environmental load is from matching the internal resistance, the further the system is away from its sustainable steady state. Therefore the systems ecologist engages in a task of resistance and impedance matching in ecological engineering, just as the electronic engineer would do.