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Article: Qualitative reasoning about population and community ecology.
- Article from:
- AI Magazine
- Article date:
- January 1, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 American Association for Artificial Intelligence. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Why use qualitative representations for ecology? A number of textbooks published recently (for example, Haefner [1996]; Jorgensen and Bendoricchio [2001]) show that ecological modeling is almost synonymous with mathematical model building. These models might be precise and sometimes closely mimic what we believe is happening in the field, but they often fail to capture the mechanisms that actually explain the observed behavior (Gillman and Hails 1997). Moreover, they require numeric data of good quality, and ecological data are often difficult to obtain because long-term observations are required, and experimentation with real systems is limited. Hence, ecological ...