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A new Species-Environment Relations (SER) modeling approach depicts key ecological functions (KEFs) and key environmental correlates (KECs) of terrestrial plant and animal species, as part of a regional assessment of the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project. Assessing KEFs of species is one facet of understanding management effects and ecological integrity of ecosystems. A relational database was developed that ties species' KEFs with their key habitats, KECs, and distribution maps. In this way, potential management activities can be evaluated for how they influence: habitats and environmental correlates; associated plant, invertebrate, and vertebrate species; the array of ecological functions associated with those species; geographic functional ecology; and potential effects on ecosystem productivity, diversity, and sustainability.

Rapid advances in information technologies continue to drive a flood of data and analysis techniques in ecological and environmental sciences. Using these resources more effectively and taking advantage of associated cross-disciplinary research opportunities poses a major challenge to both scientists and information technologists. These challenges are now being addressed in projects that apply knowledge representation and Semantic Web technologies to problems in discovering and integrating ecological data and data analysis techniques. In this paper, we present an overview of the major ontological components of our project, SEEK ("Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge"). We describe the concepts and models that are represented in each, and present a discussion of potential applications of these ontologies on the Semantic Web

One facet of modeling wildlife-habitat relations and species-environment relations may pertain to depicting the ecological roles played by organisms. I have termed these "key ecological functions" or KEFs.

For my colleagues in wildlife biology and ecology ... The Ecology Plexus For my colleagues concerned with the nature of knowledge and their apostolic science ... The Knowledge Plexus And for friends who ponder the nature of nature ... The Arts Plexus

'"A Science of Non-Classical Dynamics Based on the Progressive Evolution of the Larger Whole" In this paper, I am trying to lay out a new form of computation, which focuses on the harmony reached in a system. This type of computation in some way resembles certain recent results in chaos theory and complexity theory. However, the orientation of harmony-seeking computation is toward a kind of computation which finds harmonious configurations, and so helps to create things, above all, in real world situations: buildings, towns, agriculture, and ecology. I try to show that this way of thinking about computation is closer to intuition and personal feeling than the processes we typically describe as "computations." It is also more useful, potentially, in a great variety of tasks we face in building and taking care of the surface of the Earth, and quite different in character since it is value-oriented, not value-free. Examples are taken from art, architecture, biology, physics, astrophysics, drawing, crystallography, meteorology, dynamics of living systems, and ecology'

A sixty-six page think piece

We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems, which are considered to be robust, self-organising and scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex, dynamic problems.

Special Section on Creating Bayesian Belief Network Models in Ecology

How storytelling communicates complex ideas In this group of pages, some of the underlying mechanisms of storytelling and its relationships to knowledge and knowledge management are revealed: Narrative vs abstract thinking : Jerome Bruner Communications as media : the conventional view of Roman Jakobsen Communications the interactive view : Walter Ong Communications as social flow : David Bohm Stories and archetypes : Carl Jung Engineering vs ecological viewpoints : John Seely Brown Storytelling and the literature of persuasion : Homo vendens Storytelling and genuine persuasion : Storytelling and seduction : Jean Baudrillard Storytelling and openness : de Bono Why isn't storytelling taken seriously? Who's to blame? Why does science despise storytelling? Storytelling and zen: Eastern concepts of knowledge Storytelling and post-modernism: Jean-François Lyotard

As cultures and languages vanish, along with them go vast and ancient storehouses of accumulated knowledge. And as species disappear, along with them go not just valuable genetic resources, but critical links in complex ecological webs.

Biophysical economics is characterized by a wide range of analysts from diverse fields who use basic ecological and thermodynamic principles to analyze the economic process. The history of biophysical thought is traced from the 18th-century Physiocrats to current empirical research, with emphasis on those individuals who contributed to the development of biophysical economic theory. Attention is also given to a critique of the neoclassical theory of natural resources from a biophysical perspective, and how recent empirical biophysical research highlights areas of neoclassical theory which could be improved by a more realistic and systematic treatment of natural resources.

Our view: Globalization, ecological issues, technological impact and other modern challenges are driving the need for streamlined government collaboration. Connect to protect and serve your citizens.

The mission of The Pelican Web is to collect and analyze knowledge on obstacles to sustainable development, and to publish the monthly, free subscription, open access PelicanWeb Journal of Sustainable Development. The e-journal provides a monthly digest on current research pursuant to human solidarity, ecological sustainability, and both secular and religious non-violence.

I think that needs to change fundamentally, so that corporations really are in the business of serving all of the factors that help generate wealth-all of the stakeholders, in effect. One way to describe what has to happen, and the way that the situation in the future would be different, would be to describe it as a series of transformations. The first would be a transformation in the market. There would be a real revolution in pricing. Things that are environmentally destructive would be-if they were really destructive-almost out of reach, prohibitively expensive.

Sensemaking is the process through which humans put together understanding of related information. Sensemaking has been said to involve changes in cognitive representations during a human information processing task. Collection sensemaking involves understanding a collection of media entities, as a whole. One example of a sensemaking task is to compare the damage from Hurricane Katrina to homes, personal effects, and community buildings in different areas of New Orleans. Connected visual and semantic representations provide perspective to support users involved in collection sensemaking tasks. A zoomable map organizes images based on location at varying scales. Multiscale clusters based on zoom level organize images associated with events. The clusters afford contextualized thumbnail browsing and also maintain uniform information density on the map. Metadata enhances context and memory in the process of collection sensemaking.

Metre-wide cracks in the ground suddenly split open, as red-hot rock and ash are thrown violently into the air amid searing temperatures. It's like a vision of how the Earth behaved in prehistoric times. Except these events have happened within the last three years in Ethiopia's Afar region. What's more, a matter of days ago there was more extreme volcanic activity there, with reports of the country's biggest eruption to date - and the largest recorded lava flow in scientific history.

Collective Intelligence is a global group of entrepreneurs dedicated to improving the efficiency of social ecosystems and accelerating the flow of capital to good.