Ecosystems and the Biosphere as Complex Adaptive Systems

Ecosystems as Complex Systems

Managing Marine Ecosystems as Complex Adaptive Systems: Emergent Patterns, Critical Transitions, and Public Goods

Complex adaptive system provides a unified framework for explaining ecosystem phenomena. Three ubiquitous features of ecosystems that arise from this framework are emergent patterns, critical transitions, and cooperative behavior. Focusing on marine ecosystems, we present numerous examples of each phenomenon, using the theory of complex adaptive systems to explain the universal features and com...

Ecosystems as evolutionary complex systems: Network analysis of fitness models

Understanding and managing ecosystems as biocomplex wholes is the compelling scientific challenge of our times. Several different systemtheoretic approaches have been proposed to study biocomplexity and two in particular, Kauffman’s NK networks and Patten’s ecological network analysis, have shown promising results. This research investigates the similarities between these two approaches, which ...

Dependable Information Infrastructures as Complex Adaptive Systems

Information infrastructures, such as the Internet and Computational Grids, have enabled a networked computing and communication environment. Although many organizations depend on network-centric information operations to support critical missions, existing information infrastructures provide little guarantee of the dependability of network-centric computing and communication. This paper discuss...

Health Care Organizations as Complex Adaptive Systems

From its roots in physics, mathematics, and biology, the study of complexity science, or complex adaptive systems, has expanded into the domain of organizations and systems of organizations. Complexity science is useful for studying the evolution of complex organizations -entities with multiple, diverse, interconnected elements. Evolution of complex organizations often is accompanied by feedbac...