PARENT SESSION
Symposium #20: Extreme event analysis in ecology.
Sponsored by ESA Statistical Ecology and Long Term Studies Sections
Organized by: B. Li and R. G. Balice.
Thursday, August 9, 2001. 8:00 AM to 12:10 PM. Madison Ballroom A
Patterns in ecology: the expected and the emergent.
ANAND, MADHUR1.,
ABSTRACT- By definition, emergent properties are unexpected: are they also extreme (rare)? In some cases, it has been argued that they are. Biologists have, for example, found that deterministic chaos and the emergence of strange attractors are rare phenomena in real biological systems. Others have of course argued that these properties should be common in Nature and that the reasons for not detecting them lie in the lack of sufficient analytical tools and/or data. I will present cases studies to make the point that difficulty in detection of emergent properties may have more to do with inappropriate analytical methods and insufficiency of data than with their rarity in Nature.
KEY WORDS: data-mining, complexity, plant communities, vegetation dynamics