On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 7:25 PM, Wayne Tyson <[email protected]> wrote: > > Do you know if anyone has investigated the possible application of fuzzy > logic theory to ecology/population ecology and why or why not?
Re the first part of the question: Results 1 - 10 of about 12,300 for fuzzy logic ecology. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=fuzzy%20logic%20ecology&oe=utf-8 The results include the 2002 overview paper by Regan, Colyvan, Burgman (Ecological Applications, 12(2), 2002, pp. 618–628) as the 3rd result, available as PDF. I had not seen this before but I'll be reading it this evening, as it looks fascinating: "Abstract. Uncertainty is pervasive in ecology where the difficulties of dealing with sources of uncertainty are exacerbated by variation in the system itself. Attempts at clas- sifying uncertainty in ecology have, for the most part, focused exclusively on epistemic uncertainty. In this paper we classify uncertainty into two main categories: epistemic un- certainty (uncertainty in determinate facts) and linguistic uncertainty (uncertainty in lan- guage). We provide a classification of sources of uncertainty under the two main categories and demonstrate how each impacts on applications in ecology and conservation biology. In particular, we demonstrate the importance of recognizing the effect of linguistic uncer- tainty, in addition to epistemic uncertainty, in ecological applications. The significance to ecology and conservation biology of developing a clear understanding of the various types of uncertainty, how they arise and how they might best be dealt with is highlighted. Finally, we discuss the various general strategies for dealing with each type of uncertainty and offer suggestions for treating compounding uncertainty from a range of sources."
