Information, The Hidden Side of Life

3Ecosystem and Information

We analyzed in Chapter 1 the sort of information that is involved in human and animal communication. Chapter 2 showed how biological systems depend upon information for their survival. This chapter will explain how the concept of information opens up new avenues to improve our still-limited understanding of ecosystems. We will defend the idea that the ecosystem is a perennial system precisely because of its information flows and the encodings that sustain it.

3.1. An information-centered perspective of the ecosystem

The ecosystem is a difficult entity to understand for a simple reason: it is invisible. A forest landscape and an animal group, on the other hand, can be seen and photographed. When we see something, we are halfway to forming a mental picture of it. Some early 20th-Century scientists, such as Arthur Tansley, postulated the existence of invisible ecosystemic entities that did not resemble anything known (Tansley 1935). An ecosystem, in fact, is made up of living organisms (its biotic component) and inert things (its abiotic component). The assemblage of the biotic component, which forms the biocoenosis, remains in continuing interaction with the abiotic component, which forms the biotope. The ecosystem is thus defined as the totality of biotic and abiotic components, and the relationships that subsist between them. The relationships of importance in the ecosystem are all those that are needed for an understanding of its functioning and ...