Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
1. How does the complexity of biological, physical, and social systems in the
environment occur and change?
2. What are the mechanisms for spontaneous development of many events in the
environment?
3. How do the environmental systems with the living components including those
created by man respond and adapt themselves to stress situations?
4. How do information, energy and matter move within the environmental systems
and through their levels of organization?
5. Is it possible to forecast the adaptability of the system and to give prognostic
estimates of its changes?
6. How does humankind affect and respond to biocomplexity in natural systems?
cant questions can be added to this enu-
meration. For instance, up to what level of complexity should space-borne obser-
vation systems be improved so that their information to be of a suf
Many other, also important and signi
ciently high
standard to reliably estimate the state of the environment, even only at the moment
of receiving this information? The question of an optimal location of the geoin-
formation monitoring means at different levels of its established organization is also
important. It is also crucial to understand, which forerunners of natural disasters can
be measured using the existing space-borne systems?
Environmental biocomplexity is, to some extent, an indicator of interaction
between its systems. In this way, one can introduce the unit
ʞ
of biocomplexity
varying with conditions when all interactions in the environment are reduced to the
level corresponding to the natural process of evolution. Thus, we obtain an integral
indicator of the environmental state, on the whole, with bioavailability, biodiversity
and survivability taken into account. This indicator characterizes all kinds of
interaction of the environmental components. So, for instance, in biological inter-
actions connected with relations of the type
“
predator-prey
”
or
“
competition for
energy resource
, there is some minimal level of available food when it becomes
practically inaccessible, and the consumer-producer interaction stops. The chemical
and physical processes of interaction of environmental elements also depend on the
sets of certain critical parameters.
All this emphasizes that biocomplexity refers to categories dif
”
cult to measure
and express quantitatively. However, we shall try to give formalized quantitative
evaluations. Proceeding to quantitative numerical scale
ʞ
, we postulate that there
are relations of the type
ʞ
1
<
ʞ
2
,
ʞ
1
>
ʞ
2
or
ʞ
1
≡ ʞ
2
. In other words, there is always
a value of this scale
ˁ
, which determines the level of biocomplexity
ʞ
→
ˁ
= f(
ʞ
),
where f is a transformation of the notion of biocomplexity into a number.
Let us try to
nition
of biocomplexity into notions and features that can be formalized and converted.
With this aim in view, we select in NSS or OAS m elements
find a satisfactory model which will transform the verbal de
—
subsystems of the
lowest level, whose interaction is determined by binary matrix function A ¼
,
a
ij
where a
ij
= 0 if elements i and j do not interact; a
ij
≠
0 if elements i and j interact.
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