Forests, swamps, terrain & web ecology (long)

[Ling]

Thank for all the info about forests I have to say that originally, I just
wanted to know for descriptive purposes and for generating random
landscapes.  After all the info about how such features crop up, I could
put the knowledge to use in a terrain generator which makes terrain by
evolving them.

Swamps are another terrain type which I'm not sure about (never studied
them in geography).  I've also never seen one in life except from films...
So same question again but about swamps.  All this leads to:  I should
search the web for this info.

Upcoming long bit about web ecologies.

A word of warning, I think the below has very little to do with mud
research after a lot of thought.  However, it is very good background
knowledge.  There are some nuggets of information in there but you'll have
to search for them.

Seeing as there is a fair amount of interest, I've decided to type up
extracts from the article about the webs.  First word of warning, the
article is orientated around the parallels between nature's ecology and
the business world.  The examples it uses are from the cut throat land of
computery things.  Now, I realise a few of you recipients are computer
gurus but please don't reply with one-line smart alec comments correcting
the minor points in the article.  That activity is reserved for the
usenet. Thankyou for your cooperation. :) 

Another point, I must make clear is that this stuff has no place in Vague
for the meanwhile.  I am interested in it from a personal point of view,
not because I want to stick it in my mud.  However, I do think this sort
of thing might be of some use or even inspire some members of the mailing
list so here it is:

Mike Sellers:  Funny enuff, Stuart Kauffman got quoted in this article!

Um, typing as fast as I can whilst reading the article so some of it might
read funny.

----- start of impinging copyrights -----
>From NewScientist, 29th November
1997 Vol 156 No 2110. 

Cover title: Ruthless Connections
Article title: It's a jungle out there
Short gurp:  Why do the biggest business upsets often take us by surprise? 
             It all makes perfect sense if you think of the market as an
             ecosystem, says Roger Lewin. 
 
"No one doubted that the NeXT workstation, the brainchild of Apple
Computer cofounder Steve Jobs, was technologically superb.  The
hyper-chic-looking machine was easy to use, had multimedia capabilities
and was far more advanced in many ways than its competitors.  Yet Jobs'
brilliant creation, launched in the late 1980s, failed to penetrate the
lucrative market for workstations and languished as a curiosity, cherished
by only a few devotees.  Despite its technological superiority, NeXT was
a commercial failure."

[Another example involving DEC's Alpha chip, outpacing its nearest rival
by more than a factor of three.  Still is twice as fats as Intel's popular
Pentium chip.  Despite a mammoth marketing effort, the Alpha has captured
just 1 percent of the high-performance market compared with Intel's 92 per
cent.]

"Take a third case.  An exotic seed-eating bird is introduced to the
highland forests of Hawaii.  Yet despite being superbly adapted to this
new environment, the bird fails to establish itself.  What, you might ask,
does the bird's fate have in common with the tales of commercial woe? 
"Everything, " says Stuart Pimm, an ecologist at the University of
Tennessee in Knoxville.  "You are dealing with system-level effects."  In
all three cases the newcomer is kept out by the dynamics of the system it
is trying to invade." 

Fundamental truths
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[How this notion is bizarre to current thinking (that the CEO has no
control) but the word ecosystem has appeared on the cover of a bestselling
business book....  Even the conservative Wall Street Journal is accepting
that business is more like an ecosystem ... lots of things skipped]

"One such emergent property is the ability, already described, of an
established ecosystem to repel an invading species even if it is
competitively superior to its potential rival within the community.  The
network of connections between the species of the mature ecosystem
protects those species from outside competition.  "The potential invader
has to be very much more competitively superior if it is to surmount this
system-level effect", says Pimm...skip...  He has seen such effects many
times in ecosystem  simulated in a computer, and in real habitats in
Hawaii."


Successful invader
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"More species of birds and plants have been introduced into Hawaii than
anywhere in the world," says Pimm.  "but there are two separate ecological
worlds.  There's the highland region, which is still pristine, with native
plants and birds that have formed a tight network of connections over a
long period of time.  Relatively few species have successfully invaded
here.  And there's the lowland region, in which humans settlement has
disrupted established communities and have made them vulnerable to
invaders because the ecosystem is poorly formed." 

"Pimm's description of what it takes to be a successful invader of
ecosystems is echoed with eerie similarity by Arthur when he comments on
the commercial failure of NeXT: "A new product has to be two or three
times better in some dimension--price, speed, convenience - to dislodge a
locked-in rival."  Again, a network of connections in the form of usually
informal alliances between key companies, such as Microsoft,
Hewlett-Packard and Intel, repelled the invader.  A similar technological
ecosystem excludes Digital's Alpha chip from gaining a foothold."

[skip]

"Another emergent property of an ecosystem is its food web - the pattern
of the interaction between species within the community. Food webs involve
primary produces, herbivores, carnivores and so on.  In short, they
describe what eats whom.  Not so long ago, ecologists believed there to
be an infinity of food web patterns, because of the many possible
combinations with in a community of even modest size.  Not so.  "The
remarkable thing about food webs is that they have just a few major
characteristics," observes Pimm.  These include the length of the food
chains - a progression of who eats whom from the bottom of the food web to
the top - and the ratio of predator species to prey species.  "You see
common patterns wherever you look", adds Pimm."

"Unpredictability appears because these simple patterns can support such
complicated networks of interdependence that it because difficulty to
forecast the outcome of simple changes within the community, such as the
successful invasion of a new species.  " Sometimes the community may be
affected very little," says Pimm.  "Other times it might cause cascades of
local extinction.""

[skip]

"The way to think about economic webs is in terms of niches around some
kind of activity", says Arthur's colleague at the Santa Fe Institute,
Stuart Kauffman.  "In the days before the automobile, transport centred
on the horse-drawn carriage which required wheelwrights blacksmiths,
saddleries, wayside inns, and so on."  That ecosystem has now gone.  "When
automobiles arrived, a whole new ecosystem coevolved, requiring paved
roads, gas stations, motels and so on." 

[skip an awful lot of things about business.. Will assume everyone knows
the concept of diminishing returns.]

"Today," says Arthur, a different economic phenomenon is in evidence,
which he calls increasing returns.  "Increasing returns are the tendency
for that which is ahead to get further ahead," he states.  "If a product
or a company or a technology - one of many competing in a market - gets
ahead by chance of clever strategy, increasing returns can magnify this
advantage, and the product or company or technology can go on to lock in
the market."  As a result, a company can make a killing from a product
that is not as good as its competitors'.  This is a system-level effect,
where the inferior product survives and thrives because it is linked to
many other products in the community, this excluding competitors.
Increasing returns would not and could not happen in Marhall's world of
perfect competition." 

[Alfred Marshall, late 19th century economist, advocated the survival of
the fittest company and head to head competition.  Arthur considers one of
the best examples to be DOS and how Microsoft dominated with some clever
manoeurvings by Bill Gates.  More example with IBM & Apple's cloning
policies.  More and more bits and bobs.  Pimm argues that ecosystems are
examples of the mathematical entity known as a complex dynamical system -
and as such share characteristics such as emergent properties and
unpredictability.]

"If Pimm is right, there is some disconcerting news for CEOs.  "The first
rule of complex systems is that is is almost impossible to predict who is
a friend and who is an enemy," says Pimm.  He describes field experiments
in which a predator is removed  from a community.  You might expect its
prey, species A, to thrive.  But about half the time species A suffers
because predator has another prey species, B, which is A's competitor. 
With the population of B no longer kept in check by the predator, it may
even force species A to local extinction. "

"These effects are only one or two steps into the network," says Pimm. 
"Go to a few more steps and it becomes almost impossible to work out
possible combinations of harm and good."

[skip parallel with a business ecosystem...  Pimm mentions "When
everything is connected directly or indirectly to everything else, changes
in one part of the system may be propagated throughout the system. 
Sometimes species may go extinct through no  fault of their own."  Cute
bit upcoming.]

"There is a phrase popular among high-technology companies, coined by a
leading scientist at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre, that captures this
spirit:  "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."  This
gung-go attitude, says Moore, is doomed to failure."

[Reason:  Conventional predictions don't work.  James Moore, a business
consultant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, introduced during one of the bits
I skipped at the start.]

"Moore believes that the business world is starting to recognise the
ecosystem nature of the economy, and to respond.  "The effective leaders I
meet are the ones who are prepared to let go of the illusion of control," 
Moore says.  "and that's a good thing, because inreality they have no
choice.""
---------------- da end ----------------- 

Hope the list admin didn't mind.

  |    Ling Lo, freshwater fish (cod variant)
_O_O_  EEE, Loughborough University, England          Another 'Screemer!