ARE ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS CHAOTIC - AN ENQUIRY INTO POPULATION GROWTH MODELS

摘要

The discovery of quasiperiodic and chaotic behaviour of deceptively simple discrete population models is a major unexpected development of the last few decades. While these complex phenomena are relatively well accepted and understood in physical sciences, the biological significance of complex dynamics (chaos) is still not acknowledged fully. Indeed field data of biological populations has often been thought to somehow avoid the predictions of the mathematical models. Ecologically realistic reformulation of these models has now begun to suggest that chaos is not biologically unrealistic and that ecological processes such as migration of individuals between populations can appear to suppress complex oscillations. [References: 38]