Unifying Concepts in Ecology: Report of the plenary sessions of the First international congress of ecology, The Hague, the Netherlands, September 8-14, 1974

The complexity of ecosystems forms perhaps the greatest challenge for natural science. Even the first step to comprehensive analysis, namely a survey of the participating species, often forms a major obstacle. This makes it understandable that ecologists try to abstract general principles from the interrelationships of the multitude of species for use in their efforts to investigate ecosystem dynamics. Such 'unifying concepts' were the main theme of the 'First International Congress of Ecol...