GENETIC INFORMATION AND ECOSYSTEM HEALTH - ARGUMENTS FOR THE APPLICATION OF CHAOS THEORY TO IDENTIFY BOUNDARY-CONDITIONS FOR ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT

To meet the demands for goods and services of an exponentially growing human population, global ecosystems will come under increasing human management. The hallmark of successful ecosystem management will be lo ng-term ecosystem stability. Ecosystems and the genetic information an d processes which underlie interactions of organisms with the environm ent in populations and communities exhibit behaviors which have nonlin ear characteristics. Nonlinear mathematical formulations describing de terministic chaos have been used successfully to model such systems in physics, chemistry, economics, physiology, and epidemiology. This app roach can be extended to ecotoxicology and can be used to investigate how changes in genetic information determine the behavior of populatio ns and communities. This article seeks to provide the arguments for su ch an approach and to give initial direction to the search for the bou ndary conditions within which lies ecosystem stability. The identifica tion of a theoretical framework for ecotoxicology and the parameters w hich drive the underlying model is a critical component in the formula tion of a prioritized research agenda and appropriate ecosystem manage ment policy and regulation.