alienation news

Math discovery may aid resource management


'One of the basic concepts of ecology for generations had been that the complexity of the natural world is a big part of what makes it persistent, that the many interrelationships, interactions and food webs among different species evolved into stable systems that worked well together,' said Hiram Li, an OSU professor of fisheries and wildlife.
'But Robert May came along with a mathematical theory that suggested that increased complexity in a natural system should actually make it less stable,' Li said. 'The math seemed to work perfectly, but our observations of the real world ran contrary to this.'
For 30 years researchers have debated this paradox between the way the world appeared to work ' a 'tangled web' of thriving organisms, as Charles Darwin described it ' with May's mathematical description of the way it should work. Since the mathematical theory had not been reconciled with real-world observations, many field ecologists dismissed its importance. Applied mathematics are being used to manage fishing, hunting and control of pests, Li said, in situations that only relate to one or two species ' but they have not been applied to ecosystems or communities.
'What we came to realize, however, is that May's mathematical analysis was not really wrong, it just didn't go far enough, as even May conceded,' Rossignol said. 'So what we've tried to do is shine some light into this black box, by identifying more degrees of stability and using more variables, allowing the math to consider complexity and eventually arrive at different conclusions.'