Introducing a Pictographic Language for Envisioning a Rich Variety of Enactive Systems with Different Degrees of Complexity

Notwithstanding the considerable amount of progress that has been made in recent years, the parallel fields of cognitive science and cognitive systems lack a unifying methodology for describing, understanding, simulating and implementing advanced cognitive behaviours. Growing interest in ’enactivism’ - as pioneered by the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela - may lead to new perspectives in these areas, but a common framework for expressing many of the key concepts is still missing. This paper attempts to lay a tentative foundation in that direction by extending Maturana and Varela’s pictographic depictions of autopoietic unities to create a rich visual language for envisioning a wide range of enactive systems - natural or artificial - with different degrees of complexity. It is shown how such a diagrammatic taxonomy can help in the comprehension of important relationships between a variety of complex concepts from a pan-theoretic perspective. In conclusion, it is claimed that visual language is not only valuable for teaching and learning, but also offers important insights into the design and implementation of future advanced robotic systems

Soil resource supply influences faunal size–specific distributions in natural food webs

The large range of body-mass values of soil organisms provides a tool to assess the ecological organization of soil communities. The goal of this paper is to identify graphical and quantitative indicators of soil community composition and ecosystem functioning, and to illustrate their application to real soil food webs. The relationships between log-transformed mass and abundance of soil organisms in 20 Dutch meadows and heathlands were investigated. Using principles of allometry, maximal use can be made of ecological theory to build and explain food webs. The aggregate contribution of small invertebrates such as nematodes to the entire community is high under low soil phosphorus content and causes shifts in the mass–abundance relationships and in the trophic structures. We show for the first time that the average of the trophic link lengths is a reliable predictor for assessing soil fertility responses. Ordered trophic link pairs suggest a self-organizing structure of food webs according to resource availability and can predict environmental shifts in ecologically meaningful ways

Hoogwatergeul Veessen-Wapenveld : inschatting van de gevolgen van tijdelijke inundaties op bodemstructuur, bodemleven en grasland

In het kader van "Ruimte voor de rivier" is in de gemeente Heerde een hoogwatergeul gepland die in 2015 gereed moet zijn. De geul zal naar verwachting eens in een mensenleven gedurende 3 weken 'meestromen' met de IJssel. Het overgrote gedeelte van de geul is in gebruik als grasland. Op basis van het uitgevoerde literatuuronderzoek verwachten we weinig effecten ten aanzien van sedimentatie, verslemping en bodemverdichtin