Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 24
Perspectives in Ecological Modelling
Fred Jopp, Broder Breckling, Hauke Reuter, and Donald L. DeAngelis
24.1 Ecological Modelling: A Matured Discipline
In the chapters of this textbook we have presented a broad panorama of the network
of discourse from which Ecological Modelling emerged and grew. Starting from the
very early days, we have proceeded to give an overview of a wide spectrum of
currently available approaches. Then, after looking at a selection of prominent
model applications, we discussed how to assess model validity.
In the beginning, ecological modelling was largely influenced by approaches
outside of biology. Ecology was one of the disciplines that started relatively late to
use quantitative methods and theory. One relevant impetus for considering quanti-
tative relations came from economics (Malthus 1798). Quantification of human
interference with natural systems has always been relevant in agriculture. With the
development of agricultural chemistry (Liebig 1831), the targeted adaptation of
quantitative methods to production-oriented ecosystems became important. The
quest to understand density-dependent regulation (Verhulst 1838; Pearl 1927),
predator-prey interactions, and species competition sparked the borrowing of
differential equations from classical mechanics (Lotka-Volterra equations; Lotka
1925; Volterra 1926) to analyze ecological dynamics. While the differential equa-
tion approach was successfully applied to areas of population ecology, it was
structurally not as adequate for addressing the heterogeneity within populations
(e.g., age, size and spatial structure) as it was for addressing dynamic and equilib-
rium behaviour at the level of whole populations and simple food webs. While
analysis of food webs tended to be dominated by a few standardized approaches,
such as energy or biomass budget models (Chap. 5, Ecopath), a wider variety of
approaches emerged to deal with heterogeneity within populations. The challenge
that drove methodological development for a number of decades was how to cope
with the difficulties of representing temporal and spatial heterogeneities. With the
development of object-oriented approaches (Dahl et al. 1968; Kaiser 1976, 1979;
