In a February 26 Science News article, SFI Professor Jennifer Dunne responds to a Northwestern University study examining how perturbations propagate through a network of organisms, demonstrating that when an ecosystem is off-kilter, removing particular species can halt the cascade of destruction that may follow.
By modeling who eats whom and how the exchange of biomass leads to changes in population levels over time, the Northwestern researchers could identify particular species whose removal or suppression would contain damage. Tactics such as birth control for deer that are overrunning an area, or encouraged fishing to bring down a species’ numbers, may prevent damage to multiple other species, their analysis suggests.
"This is a significant advance over prior related work," says computational ecologist Jennifer Dunne of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, noting that the work is adept at combining the complexity of ecosystem interactions.
"If we make bad decisions it doesn’t just affect ecosystems; it affects us," Dunne says. "So it behooves us to get beyond overly simplistic ways to confront and manage perturbations." Additional interactions between species -- such as pollinator-plant relationships, or how an animal such as a beaver may alter a habitat -- should be incorporated into future modeling efforts, she says.
Read the Science New article (February 26, 2011)