Modellers of biological, ecological, and environmental systems cannot take for granted the maxim 'simple means general means good'. We argue here that viewing simple models as the main way to achieve generality may be an obstacle to the progress of ecological research. We show how complex models can be both desirable and general, and how simple and complex models can be linked together to produ...

Operational models of economic activity, particularly at the farm scale, have become commonly used, and widely accepted methods and applications exist. Operational models of ecological systems probably have less of a history but processes of species interaction and succession are well documented. Relationships between economic farm-scale variables and resultant ecological diversity, however, ar...

Modelling of economic and ecological impacts of genetically modified crops is a demanding task. We present some preliminary attempts made for the purpose of the ECOGEN project “Soil ecological and economic evaluation of genetically modified crops”. One of the goals of the project is to develop a computer-based decision support system for the assessment of economic and ecological impacts of usin...

Ecological risk assessment requires the integration of a wide range of data on anthropogenic processes, ecological processes and on processes related to environmental fate and transport. It is a major challenge to assemble a simulation system that can successfully capture the dynamics of complex ecological systems and an even more serious challenge to be able to adapt such a simulation to shift...

Forecasting ecological responses to climate change represents a challenge to the ecological community because models are often site-specific and climate data are lacking at appropriate spatial and temporal resolutions. We use a case study approach to demonstrate uncertainties in ecological predictions related to the driving climatic input data. We use observational records, derived observationa...

ModEco is a software package for ecological niche modeling. It integrates a range of niche modeling methods within a geographical information system. ModEco provides a user friendly platform that enables users to explore, analyze, and model species distribution data with relative ease. ModEco has several unique features: 1) it deals with different types of ecological observation data, such as p...

Cross disciplinary dialogue between economics and ecology has within economics centered on the two subdisciplines of bioeconomics and ecological economics. This division in economics reflects the division in ecology between population and systems ecologists. Recent developments in ecology are aimed at a more integrated approach to ecologic al research. One example of such an approach is that of...

This paper develops a joint econometric-simulation framework to forecast detailed empirical distributions of the spatial pattern of land-use and ecosystem change. In-sample and out-of-sample forecasting tests are used to examine the performance of the parcel-scale econometric and simulation models, and the importance of multiple forecasting challenges is assessed. The econometric-simulation met...

We develop a theoretical framework for analyzing ecological models with a multidimensional niche space. Our approach relies on the fact that ecological niches are described by sequences of symbols, which allows us to include multiple phenotypic traits. Ecological drivers, such as competitive exclusion, are modeled by introducing the Hamming distance between two sequences. We show that a suitabl...

Evolutionary branching occurs when frequency-dependent selection splits a phenotypically monomorphic population into two distinct phenotypic clusters. A prerequisite for evolutionary branching is that directional selection drives the population toward a fitness minimum in phenotype space. This article demonstrates that selection regimes leading to evolutionary branching readily arise from a wid...