From individuals to populations and
communities
Pierre Auger
UMR CNRS 5558
Laboratoire de Biometrie, Genetique et Biologie des Populations
Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1
43, boulevard du 11 Novembre 1918
69622 Villeurbanne cedex, FRANCE
pauger@biomserv.univ-lyon1.fr
Eva Sánchez
Departamento de Matemáticas, E.T.S.I. Industriales, U. Politécnica de Madrid
José Gutiérrez Abascal 2.
28806 Madrid, Spain
esanchez@math.etsii.upm.es
Ecological systems are made up of different
levels of organization, the individual, the population and the community levels.
Dealing with different levels of organization signifies that one must study
models in which the dynamics in the different levels must be coupled. Important
differences in the orders of magnitude of the spatial and time scales involved
in these ecological levels makes possible to use perturbation methods in order
to reduce the dimension of the complete model. Aggregation methods are important
in Ecology because one can obtain at each level of organization an approximate
dynamical system governing a few number of global variables which is more
tractable than the complete system involving a large number of state variables.
The session is devoted to the presentation of reduction and aggregation methods
in Ecological modelling with a special emphasis on applications such as spatial
population and community dynamics (spatial aggregation), coupled individual and
population dynamics, and coupled population and community dynamics.