Abstract
Nearly 250 million years ago, the Earth was shaken by the amplest extinction known so far, which led to the extinction of up to 96% of all the marine species, 70% of the vertebrate species, and almost all the insects. This extinction affected the whole range of biodiversity so much. Nature took almost 10 million years to recover after this event. Life was really in danger on our planet at that moment, due to the dismal conditions that were created, and the current research shows that these dire conditions continued to occur, in the natural environment, after that, triggering numerous outbreaks that occurred for five to six million years following the initial crisis, triggered by the carbon rise and the repeated shortages of oxygen, the increased warming and other such adverse effects, which, once initiated, were uncontrollable and had disastrous effects. When life returned to normal and, gradually, after several million years, a new beginning was possible, the significant elements that caused the disaster - global warming, acid rain - sound strangely familiar to us today.
TopProductive Capacity And Carrying Capacity
This conceptual progress permitted to investigate and know the productive and carrying capacity of ecosystems or ecosystems complexes. Errors have also been committed, like those of the period 1960-1985, when, without a sufficiently consolidated basis, a series of sub disciplines were differentiated, such as: ecophysiology, ecotoxicology, biochemical ecology, biophysical ecology, agroecology, urban ecology, human ecology etc., which, operating each with many, often conflicting concepts, created confusions, undermining the coherence and credibility of ecology as a science.
During the same period, the theoretical basis of ecology was consolidated and completed with dynamic systems mathematics, attaining during the last two decennia of the 20th century the systemic conception that gave ecology the force and means necessary to perceive and interpret the physical and biological environment as a hierarchy of complex ecosystems, dynamically influencing one another. At the same time, the passage from the analythical method to systemic analysis allows identifying ecological systems as real entities and identifying, at the same time, ways of investigating them and of describing their behavior.
Systemic analysis supposes an integrated holistic approach both in the research and especially in the management of natural ecological systems and of those dominated by the human species.
During the present stage, after the conceptual clarification of ecology as science of the ecological systems, an ample process of identification of the ecosystems organized in hierarchies, from simple to complex, also comprising anthropized systems, has been started, to be able to project and then develop support information systems and especially organize their integrated management.