computational ecology from the complex to the simple and back计算生态从复杂到简单,回来.pdfVIP

Perspectives Computational Ecology: From the Complex to the Simple and Back Mercedes Pascual n 1958, when ecology was a young science and on the dynamics of large food webs, the ultimate networks of I mathematical models for ecological systems were in their ecological interactions. infancy, Elton [1] wrote of the ‘‘neolithic days of animal ecology, that is to say about twenty-five years ago.’’ From Individuals to Populations: How Local Effects Acknowledging the influence of Lotka and Volterra, he noted, Translate into Global Results ‘‘Being mathematicians, they did not attempt to contemplate Lotka–Volterra equations and their many descendants a whole food-chain with all the complications of five stages. assume that individuals are well mixed and interact at mean They took two: a predator and its prey.’’ population abundances. They are mean-field equations that Today, in the era of computational ecological modeling, use the mass-action law to describe the dynamics of deterministic systems for two variables—and even a whole food interacting populations, and ignore both the scale of chain—appear like simple idealizations well removed from the individual interactions and their spatial distribution. A key complexity of nature. We now consider predator–prey interactions as ‘‘consumer–resource’’ interactions embedded question therefore is: can the spatial variability ge