Ecology & Math

3 Pages 628 Words

Mathematics and Ecology
Dr. Louis J. Gross, University of Tennessee
Ecology is the science which deals with interactions between living organisms and their environment. Historically it has focused on questions such as:
Why do we observe certain organisms in certain places and not others?
What limits the abundances of organisms and controls their dynamics?
What causes the observed groupings of organisms of different species, called the community, to vary across the planet?
What are the major pathways for movement of matter and energy within and between natural systems?

The above questions serve as the focus of several distinct fields within ecology. Physiological ecology deals with interactions between individual organisms and external environmental forces, such as temperature, with a focus on how individual physiology and behavior varies across different environment. Population ecology deals with the dynamics and structure (age, size, sex, etc.) of groups of organisms of the same species. Community ecology deals with the biological interactions (predator-prey, competition, mutualism, etc.) which occur between species. Ecosystem ecology deals with the movement of matter and energy between communities and the physical environment.

Mathematics, as the language of science, allows us to carefully phrase questions concerning each of the above areas of ecology. It is through mathematical descriptions of ecological systems that we abstract out the basic principles of these systems and determine the implications of these. Ecological systems are enormously complex. A major advantage of mathematical ecology is the capability to selectively ignore much of this complexity and determine whether by doing so we can still explain the major patterns of life on the planet. Thus simple population models group together all individuals of the same species and follow only the total number in the population. By ignoring the complexity of dif...