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Ecological Complexity

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Book cover Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science

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Abbreviations

Ascendancy:

The tendency, in the absence of disturbances, for an ecosystem to increase in size or total throughput and to have more constrained pathways for within system flows.

Bioinformatics:

The storage, processing, and analysis of very large arrays of biological data.

Dispersal limitation:

Limitation of the number of species within an ecological community due to decreased probabilities of some species entering a local ecological. community by dispersal.

Ecological community:

The collection of individual organisms of different species that are found within the boundaries of an ecosystem.

Ecological drift:

Random changes in the relative abundances of species within a community due to stochastic population processes.

Ecosystem:

an arbitrary ensemble of macroscopic matter that captures, stores, and uses energy to circulate and rearrange matter within the system.

Emobodied energy (emergy):

Potential energy stored in chemicals bonds within an ecological entity (organism, population, community, etc.).

Food web:

A network describing the flows of energy and matter within an ecosystem.

General metabolic equation:

Phenomenological description of how mass, temperature, and resource concentration affect the metabolic rate of an organism or an ensemble of organisms.

Metabolic scaling:

The exponential relationship of average body mass with the rates of many metabolic processes.

Metacommunity:

A collection of many local communities aggregated are larger spatial scales.

Tranformity:

The total amount of solar energy required to form a unit of biological material.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Graduate Program in Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, and Behavior, Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA

    Brian A. Maurer

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  1. Brian A. Maurer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. RAMTECH LIMITED, 122 Escalle Lane, Larkspur, CA, 94939, USA

    Robert A. Meyers Ph. D. (Editor-in-Chief) (Editor-in-Chief)

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Maurer, B.A. (2009). Ecological Complexity . In: Meyers, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30440-3_162

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