From Populations to Ecosystems: Theoretical Foundations for a New Ecological Synthesis

Building a theory that merges population, community, and ecosystem ecology requires at the very least that the fundamental descriptions of reality provided by the various subdisciplines be compatible with each other. But meeting this basic requirement is far from being a trivial issue given the widely different conceptual foundations and formalisms used by population and community ecology on the one hand and by ecosystem ecology on the other. In this introductory chapter, I first briefly revisit the foundations and formalisms of the population and ecosystem approaches in ecology. I then show how mass and energy budgets can bridge the gap between them. Last, I present a minimal ecosystem model to illustrate how an approach based on mass and energy budgets can be used to build simple models that combine the flexibility of demographic models and the physical realism of ecosystem models. The approach developed in this chapter will be the basis for most of the models presented in the rest of the book.

A population is a set of organisms from the same biological species in a given area. Since all individuals belonging to the same species are very similar to each other when considered over a whole life cycle, classical approaches to population ecology ignore variability among individuals and assume that these are identical. As a consequence, population dynamics focuses on changes in the number or density of individuals that make up the population. Thus, population ecology fundamentally has a demographic approach to reality, in which the basic unit of measurement is the individual.

-1-