I missed Wayne's posting since the subject line had nothing to do with fuzzy
logic, and although I know that I will raise a chorus of outrage I am
changing the subject line.
Quite a few papers on fuzzy logic aplications have been published, many in
Ecological Modelling (including a couple of my own). I also have some
PowerPoint presentations on my website, http://ciencia.silvert.org, and
there are many in related fields such as soil science. I think that one of
my first efforts was in niche theory, obviously the "multi-dimensional
manifold" that Hutchinson defined must have fuzzy boundaries.
Unfortunately a lot of work in the field seems to consist of lots of
mathematics with little biological content. I like to think in terms of
fuzzy rules like
IF the weather is warm AND nutrient levels are high THEN there is a serious
risk of bottom anoxia
(which is similar to a rule composed for aquaculture siting) but many
authors seem more concerned with whether the membership function is
triangular or trapezoidal.
As with any new field or approach, fuzzy ecology is experiencing growing
pains. There was an international conference on the topic in Kiel many years
ago, perhaps 15, but progress has been slow.
Bill Silvert
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Nelson" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, August 06, 2009 3:00 PM
Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] Bayesian analysis in population ecology workshop,
early registration deadline 10 August 2009
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."
