Abstract
Ecology is the science that studies the relationships among the environmental components. More specifically, its overall goal is describing the natural phenomena, studying the causal relationships between events and identifying the presence of regularities in the processes under investigation. The discovery of these regularities may allow the definition of models, that is, some conceptual, synthetic, and schematic representations symbolizing the complexity of the real world.
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Notes
- 1.
See the categories of uncertainty in Keith (2009). Epistemic uncertainty: on the imperfect knowledge of the state of the system; linguistic uncertainty: relative to the incomplete, imprecise and inaccurate language used to describe the state itself.
- 2.
In the following text, we will refer to the term environmental, natural or ecological system to denote any unit composed of several components in relation to each other: populations (systems of individual components), community (systems of populations of species), ecosystem (systems of biological communities and abiotic components), and landscapes (systems of ecosystems). The systems are equipped with specific properties (defined as emerging) that do not depend on the sum of the characteristics of their components, but on the synergistic interaction among them.
- 3.
Another definition of complex adaptive system is an open system formed by a number of elements non-linearly interacting and that constitutes a single, organized, and dynamic entity, able to evolve and adapt to the environment through various feedback processes (based on “inheritable” changes or through the individual acquisition of learned behaviors; Farina 2006).
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Battisti, C., Poeta, G., Fanelli, G. (2016). Heterogeneity, Dynamism, and Diversity of Natural Systems. In: An Introduction to Disturbance Ecology. Environmental Science and Engineering(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32476-0_1
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