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Perspectives on the ELM Model and Modeling Efforts This volume is the major open-literature description of a comprehensive, pioneering ecological modeling effort. The ELM model is one of the major outputs of the United States Grassland Biome study, a contribution to the International Biological Program (IBP). Writing this introduction provides wel come personal opportunity to (i) review briefly the state of the art at the beginning of the ELM modeling effort in 1971, (ii) to discuss some aspects of the ELM model's role in relation to other models and other phases of the Grassland Biome study, and (iii) to summarize the evolution of ELM or its components since 1973. Pre-Program Historical Perspective My first major contacts with ecological simulation modeling were in 1960 when I was studying intraseasonal herbage dynamics and nutrient production on foothill grasslands in southcentral Montana, making year-round measurements of the aboveground live vegetation, the standing dead, and the litter. Limitations in funding and the rockiness of the foothill soils prevented measuring the dynamics of the root biomass, both live and dead. Herbage biomass originates in live shoots from which it could be translocated into live roots or the live shoots could transfer to standing dead or to litter. Standing dead vegetation must end up in the litter and the live roots eventually transfer to dead roots. Obviously, the litter and the dead roots must decay away.
The development of computer simulation models is an important growth area in both pure and applied ecology. The opportunity that mathematical models provide to integrate the components of an ecosystem, results in the ability to make quantitative predictions about the future behavior of that system, or of elements within it. This means that they are powerful tools with wide applications and enormous potential for increasing our understanding of natural systems and our ability to use them in a sustainable way. This book is, almost uniquely, a complete account of one such model, the Hurley Pasture Model, a dynamic, deterministic, mechanistic simulation model for grassland, which has been developed by the author over some 20 years, in collaboration with scientists at several centers. Firstly, the rationale and theoretical elements of this type of model are described. An overview of the Hurley grassland simulator and the derivation and construction of its plant, animal, soil and litter, water, and environment and management components is then given. Next, the model is evaluated by a series of long and short-term dynamic simulations and steady state responses, which demonstrate how predictions can be made about the effects of, for example, climate change or particular regimes of fertilizer application, grazing or cutting. This book will be of great value to grassland agronomists and modellers, crop physiologists and plant ecologists, and to students of ecology as a case study of a plant ecosystem model. It will also be of interest to other ecologists and environmentalists and those in the field of computer modelling and its applications.
The pulse of life with the seasons is a classic theme of biology, equally cap turing every man's curiosity about early and late milestones of every year's cycle and the critical physiologist's inquiry into life's subtle signals and responses. Natural historians of ancient and renaissance time as well as today have charted the commonsense facts behind inspired traditions of poetry and practical rules for growing food and fiber. This volume brings together several ways of organizing the basic principles of phenology. These find order in the otherwise overwhelming mass of detail that captures our fleeting attention, like the daily newspaper, and then tends to fade into the overstuffed archives of history. Is this order so obvious and understandable that there is no longer any scien tific challenge to "phenology" as a tradition? Or does apparent simplicity mask a complex and ultimately baffling obstacle to the understanding of seasonality in even those few indicator plants and animals we know best, not to men tion the less known species or races making up the rest of each major land scape unit or ecosystem? Denying both these hasty opinions, we think that this volume well illustrates a range of questions and answers-from soundly established (but not trivial) doctrine to exciting inquiry about how ecosystems are organized.
This 1980 book was a synthesis of much of the recent work on the functioning of grassland ecosystems at the time.