PARENT SESSION
Oral Session # 90: Ecological Theory III: Modeling: Populations; Disease.
Presiding: K Dixon
Friday, August 8. 8:30 AM to 12:00 PM, SITCC Meeting Room 102.
Evaluating ecological models: Encoding, decoding and complementarity.
Zellmer, Amada*,1, Allen, Timothy1, 1 Department of Botany, Madison, WI, USA
ABSTRACT- We have built a unified treatment of several bodies of ecological theory from hierarchical complex systems analysis and general systems theory (GST). Our framework cleaves cycles of model-building from cycles of material emergence, but allows them to intersect in individual structures, such as organisms. In one cycle a model is formed from the observation of a structure, and its assignment to an equivalence class or type. The class may be a level of organization. That model is verified by application to other structures through scaled observation, to see if the other structures meet the criterion for equivalence. The other cycle is a self-correcting system of realization of a structure from a context (e.g. though DNA for organisms or election for a US President), followed by modification of that context by the realized structure (e.g. though natural selection in biology, or changes in attitude after Presidential impeachment). These analogous cycles of reinforcement are the basis of our device for recognizing observer presence in observation and models. With this framework, we can assist environmental practitioners in keeping track of the layers of subjectivity embedded in their actions. When models cease to be verified by application to new structures (e.g. in fixed levels of chemical benchmarks accepted to indicate toxicity), change in the other cycle leaves the model behind (e.g. increased tolerance in natural populations). Now that we have uncovered this pattern, we attempt to bring it into the arena of environmental application. Although the ultimate goal is application to concrete management situations, we must first work out how one takes these abstractions and applies them to more tangible circumstances.
Key words: observer decisions, hierarchy theory, modeling, emergence