Ecology, the Ascendent Perspective deals primarily with the causes behind the development of ecosystems and other naturally-organizing systems. It traces the prevailing scientific worldview to origins other than Isaac Newton. In the process it shows how the newtonian concensus has co-opted significant challenges by thermodynamics and genetics by forcing these disciplines to adopt an image of a world that is causally closed. Ecology, by contrast, seems more at home in a conceptual environment where, as Karl Popper suggests, causes can arise at all scales of observation.

But one does not again open the Pandora's box of a contingent universe without at the same time accounting for how the order in the world (and in ecosystems in particular) can arise and be maintained. Toward this end, the "glue" of nature appears as what Popper has described as context-dependent "propensities" that result from chance interferences between processes. Once these propensities appear, they can be maintained as formal and final causal agencies in the sense first espoused by Aristotle and recently given new form by Robert Rosen.

The workings of these non-Newtonian agencies amongst any ensemble of processes can be expressed in concrete and measureable fashion by a whole system attribute called the "ascendency", which expresses the size and organization of the system in information-theoretic terms. The same calculus of information theory also quantifies the limits to system growth and development. Ascendency theory allows one to express the overall status of a dynamic system in quantitative fashion. The degree of system response to perturbation finally can be measured. The theory also affords quantitative meanings for heretofore vague notions, such as "eutrophication" and ecosystem "health". In ascendency one discovers a new gauge of system performance that can be applied to ecological, biological or physical systems.

In short, the notion of ascendency, and the causality that it entails, opens a decidedly new window on the world of events. It offers a perspective that is more amenable than conventional wisdom will allow to the notions of free-will and human dignity. It throws a wholly new light on how scientific research should be pursued (and funded). It offers useful analogies for the fields of economics, jurisprudence and political science. It even shows potential for ameliorating the perceived antagonism between science and religion. Finally, it catapults ecology from the margins of science, where it has lain adumbrated by netwonian thinking, into the spotlight of interest, from where it can illumine new pathways for scientific thinking.

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"Ulanowicz does a superb job of describing the analysis of ecosystem flow networks..." (Quarterly Review of Biology)

"What Ulanowicz has done is to bring together the essential points and concepts, to present them in a charming and literate way, sprinkled liberally with numerical examples to illustrate concepts, and to educate us about another way to view nature." (Ecology)

This volume presents a new perspective on growth and development in ecological systems. The concepts of growth and development are removed from the confines of ontogeny and portrayed via a new and qualitative principle as elements of larger- scale ecological, economic, and social systems. This shift in perspective frees the biologist froom the obligation to interpret all phenomena in strictly reductionistic terms. The Darwinian notion of fitness thereby acquires a new meaning as the ability of a species to play a coherent role in the web of ecological processes.

Although the text speaks to the ecologist, the systematic and mathematical approach should also have great appeal to the systems theorist, the cyberneticist, and the thermodynamicist. Numerical examples support each new idea, and the careful organization and presentation guide the reader to the iniversal perspective presented by the author.

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A New Ecology presents an ecosystem theory based on the following ecosystem properties: physical openness, ontic openness, directionality, connectivity, a complex dynamic for growth and development, and a complex dynamic response to disturbances. Each of these properties is developed in detail to show that these basic and characteristic properties can be applied to explain a wide spectrum of ecological obsevations and convections. It is also shown that the properties have application for environmental management and for assessment of ecosystem health.

The authors demonstrate an ecosystem theory that can be applied to explain ecological observations and rules and discuss an ecosystem theory that is based on a few basic properties that are characteristic for ecosystems.

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This volume provides a current synthesis of theoretical and empirical food web research. Whether they are binary systems or weighted networks, food webs are of particular interest to ecologists in providing a macroscopic view of ecosystems. They describe interactions between species and their environment, and subsequent advances in the understanding of their structure, function, and dynamics are of vital importance to ecosystem management and conservation. Aquatic Food Webs provides a synthesis of the current issues in food web theory and its applications, covering issues of structure, function, scaling, complexity, and stability in the contexts of conservation, fisheries, and climate. Although the focus of this volume is upon aquatic food webs (where many of the recent advances have been made), any ecologist with an interest in food web theory and its applications will find the issues addressed in this book of value and use. This advanced textbook is suitable for graduate level students as well as professional researchers in community, ecosystem, and theoretical ecology, in aquatic ecology, and in conservation biology.

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Holistic descriptions of marine ecosystems offer an alternative to characterizing biotic communities in terms of coupled process models. Most quantitative narratives of whole ecosystem organization and development draw from five subject areas: Thermodynamics provides the phenomenological and macroscopic perspective necessary to perceive whole system behavior. Statistical Mechanics is an historical example of how microscopic observations and hypotheses may be reconciled with their macroscopic counterparts. Ataxonomic Aggregations of organisms, such as classifications according to particle size or metabolic rate, rely less upon "microscopic" (i.e., taxonomic) features of the ecosystem and could be more appropriate elements with which to build holistic theories in marine ecology. Flow Analysis is quantitative theory germane to the study of how the parts of an ecosystem directly and indirectly affect each other within the context of the entire system. Lastly, Information Theory is a formalism capable of bridging and ultimately unifying the preceding four disciplines.

Holistic considerations of ecosystem behavior tend, at this early stage, to be highly abstract. The existing theories, nonetheless, have practical implications for existing biological programs. Various holistic hypotheses may be tested in both exploited and non- exploited marine ecosystems. Macroscopic concepts can promote a better understanding of biological- physical interactions and suggest the development of new technological instrumentation and methods. Finally, whole community descriptions beg for the design of new, large- scale, cooperative experiments in biological oceanography.

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This volume represents the concensus reached by Working Group 59 of UNESCO's Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research, charged with assessing the utility of mathematical models in biological oceanography.

The working group reconizes two approaches to modelling biological oceanographic systems: the reductionistic and the holistic. The first of these deals with disticnt processes that are studied in isolation from the total system, in the classical manner of laboratory science. Such "single- process" models have proven quite efficacious as tools for understanding and predicting focal processes.

There are, however, many questions in biological oceanography that involve the interactions of several processes working simultaneously. Unfortunately, the success of such "coupled- process" models has been nowhere as great as their single- process counterparts, and the Working Group recommends that other methods for quantifying whole ecosystems be explored. Possibly fruitful new directions that are surveyed in this volume include network analyses, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, particle- size theory, and information theory.

A primary recommendation that underlies all exploratory methods is the insight that "for understanding biological oceanographic systems, it is necessary to have at least as much information on the fluxes [of material and energy] as on the biomasses." The implications that this advice has for the planning and execution of research programmes include more reliance on scale and dimensional analysis and the statistical design of field programmes.

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