Revista Chilena de Historia Natural 77 (4): 711-723, 2004
COMMENTARY
Why the dimension matters in ecological models?
In this work we discuss the ecological and mathematical significance of system’s
dimension in continuous-time population dynamics models. We show how the system’s dimension reflects the ecological assumptions
and affects both the spectrum of dynamic output and mathematical tractability of the models. We stress that the model dimension is
not always the same as the number of state-variables, and we also present conditions under which the system’s dimension is
altered.
Key words:
ODE, population
dynamics, theoretical models, mathematical ecology, stability
