Making ecological models adequate

MAKING ECOLOGICAL VALUES MAKE SENSE: toward more operationalizable ecological legislation

Value claims about ecological populations, communities, and systems appear everywhere in literature put out by leading environmental advisory institutions. This essay clarifies the content of such normatively significant value claims in two main steps. In it, I first outline the conception of ecological entities, functionality, and properties, I argue is operative in the background of modern ec...

Adequate Models for Recursive Program Schemes

This thesis is a pedagogical exposition of adequacy for recursive program schemes in the monotone frame. Adequacy relates the operational and denotational meanings of a term; it states that for any term of base type, the operational and denotational meanings are identical. Adequacy is typically proved in the continuous frame. This is a pedagogically questionable step; in order to prove adequacy...

Ecological and Socio-ecological Economic Models

Integrating Urban Ecological Models

Over the past 20 years, understanding of the functioning of urban ecosystems has increased to the point where fairly sophisticated models of various subsystems have been developed by scientists working for federal, state, and local agencies, often in cooperation with university researchers. Each is designed to collect data and explore a specific urban/environmental system for issues related to ...

Partially Specified Ecological Models

Models are useful when they are compared with data. Whether this comparison should be qualitative or quantitative depends on circumstances, but in many cases some statistical comparison of model and data is useful and enhances objectivity. Unfortunately, ecological dynamic models tend to contain assumptions and simplifications which enhance tractability, promote insight, but spoil model fit and...