Abiotic Variability and Biocomplexity in the Northern Adriatic

The level of degradation in coastal ecosystems has generated a new urgency to redirect the science of assessing these systems in order that their economic value can assist in their conservation. This new challenge will combine the concept of biocomplexity and the methodology of the systems approach. Accordingly, biocomplexity suggests that changes in the structure and function of an ecosystem result from the interactions between sub-components of the system. Systems theory maintains that an understanding of a system’s response requires a simultaneous accounting of all significant internal and external interactions. A conceptual model of the circulation and nitrogen processing is used as a mechanism to illustrate how this combined approach might be applied to the Northern Adriatic ecosystem and its response to changes to its exogenous inputs. In part this involves the identification of the control points and interactions that determine the mass and information fluxes within the syste...