On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 10:00 AM, Jonathan Nelson<[email protected]> wrote: > 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." >
You might also find Rick Boyce's webpage on Fuzzy Set Ordination of interest. http://www.nku.edu/~boycer/fso/ Michael -- Michael Denslow Graduate Student I.W. Carpenter Jr. Herbarium [BOON] Department of Biology Appalachian State University Boone, North Carolina U.S.A. -- AND -- Communications Manager Southeast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections sernec.org
