Biosphere 2 is an American Earth system science research facility located in Oracle, Arizona. Its mission is to serve as a center for research, outreach, teaching, and lifelong learning about Earth, its living systems, and its place in the universe. It is a 3.14-acre (1.27-hectare) structure originally built to be an artificial, materially closed ecological system, or vivarium. It remains the largest closed ecological system ever created.
Howard Thomas Odum, usually cited as H. T. Odum, was an American ecologist. He is known for his pioneering work on ecosystem ecology, and for his provocative proposals for additional laws of thermodynamics, informed by his work on general systems theory.
Embodied energy is the sum of all the energy required to produce any goods or services, considered as if that energy was incorporated or 'embodied' in the product itself. The concept can be useful in determining the effectiveness of energy-producing or energy saving devices, or the "real" replacement cost of a building, and, because energy-inputs usually entail greenhouse gas emissions, in deciding whether a product contributes to or mitigates global warming. One fundamental purpose for measuring this quantity is to compare the amount of energy produced or saved by the product in question to the amount of energy consumed in producing it.
Ecological engineering uses ecology and engineering to predict, design, construct or restore, and manage ecosystems that integrate "human society with its natural environment for the benefit of both".
Emergy is the amount of energy consumed in direct and indirect transformations to make a product or service. Emergy is a measure of quality differences between different forms of energy. Emergy is an expression of all the energy used in the work processes that generate a product or service in units of one type of energy. Emergy is measured in units of emjoules, a unit referring to the available energy consumed in transformations. Emergy accounts for different forms of energy and resources Each form is generated by transformation processes in nature and each has a different ability to support work in natural and in human systems. The recognition of these quality differences is a key concept.
The Latin term characteristica universalis, commonly interpreted as universal characteristic, or universal character in English, is a universal and formal language imagined by Gottfried Leibniz able to express mathematical, scientific, and metaphysical concepts. Leibniz thus hoped to create a language usable within the framework of a universal logical calculation or calculus ratiocinator.
The energy systems language, also referred to as energese, or energy circuit language, or generic systems symbols, is a modelling language used for composing energy flow diagrams in the field of systems ecology. It was developed by Howard T. Odum and colleagues in the 1950s during studies of the tropical forests funded by the United States Atomic Energy Commission.
Systems ecology is an interdisciplinary field of ecology, a subset of Earth system science, that takes a holistic approach to the study of ecological systems, especially ecosystems. Systems ecology can be seen as an application of general systems theory to ecology. Central to the systems ecology approach is the idea that an ecosystem is a complex system exhibiting emergent properties. Systems ecology focuses on interactions and transactions within and between biological and ecological systems, and is especially concerned with the way the functioning of ecosystems can be influenced by human interventions. It uses and extends concepts from thermodynamics and develops other macroscopic descriptions of complex systems.
In 1996 H.T. Odum defined transformity as,
"the emergy of one type required to make a unit of energy of another type. For example, since 3 coal emjoules (cej) of coal and 1 cej of services are required to generate 1 J of electricity, the coal transformity of electricity is 4 cej/J"
Energy quality is a measure of the ease with which a form of energy can be converted to useful work or to another form of energy: i.e. its content of thermodynamic free energy. A high quality form of energy has a high content of thermodynamic free energy, and therefore a high proportion of it can be converted to work; whereas with low quality forms of energy, only a small proportion can be converted to work, and the remainder is dissipated as heat. The concept of energy quality is also used in ecology, where it is used to track the flow of energy between different trophic levels in a food chain and in thermoeconomics, where it is used as a measure of economic output per unit of energy. Methods of evaluating energy quality often involve developing a ranking of energy qualities in hierarchical order.
The environmental humanities is an interdisciplinary area of research, drawing on the many environmental sub-disciplines that have emerged in the humanities over the past several decades, in particular environmental literature, environmental philosophy, environmental history, science and technology studies, environmental anthropology, and environmental communication. Environmental humanities employs humanistic questions about meaning, culture, values, ethics, and responsibilities to address pressing environmental problems. The environmental humanities aim to help bridge traditional divides between the sciences and the humanities, as well as between Western, Eastern, and Indigenous ways of relating to the natural world and the place of humans within it. The field also resists the traditional divide between "nature" and "culture," showing how many "environmental" issues have always been entangled in human questions of justice, labor, and politics. Environmental humanities is also a way of synthesizing methods from different fields to create new ways of thinking through environmental problems.
The maximum power principle or Lotka's principle has been proposed as the fourth principle of energetics in open system thermodynamics, where an example of an open system is a biological cell. According to Howard T. Odum, "The maximum power principle can be stated: During self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency."
Corrado Giannantoni is an Italian nuclear scientist.
James J. Kay was an ecological scientist and policy-maker. He was a respected physicist best known for his theoretical work on complexity and thermodynamics.
Woodchips are small- to medium-sized pieces of wood formed by cutting or chipping larger pieces of wood such as trees, branches, logging residues, stumps, roots, and wood waste.
Sustainability metrics and indices are measures of sustainability, and attempt to quantify beyond the generic concept. Though there are disagreements among those from different disciplines, these disciplines and international organizations have each offered measures or indicators of how to measure the concept.
Urban metabolism is a model to facilitate the description and analysis of the flows of the materials and energy within cities, such as undertaken in a material flow analysis of a city. It provides researchers with a metaphorical framework to study the interactions of natural and human systems in specific regions. From the beginning, researchers have tweaked and altered the parameters of the urban metabolism model. C. Kennedy and fellow researchers have produced a clear definition in the 2007 paper The Changing Metabolism of Cities claiming that urban metabolism is "the sum total of the technical and socio-economic process that occur in cities, resulting in growth, production of energy and elimination of waste." With the growing concern of climate change and atmospheric degradation, the use of the urban metabolism model has become a key element in determining and maintaining levels of sustainability and health in cities around the world. Urban metabolism provides a unified or holistic viewpoint to encompass all of the activities of a city in a single model.
William Mitsch, born March 29, 1947, in Wheeling, West Virginia, US, is an ecosystem ecologist and ecological engineer who was co-laureate of the 2004 Stockholm Water Prize in August 2004 as a result of a career in wetland ecology and restoration, ecological engineering, and ecological modelling.
Christopher Ray Johnson is an American computer scientist. He is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of Utah, and founding director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute (SCI). His research interests are in the areas of scientific computing and scientific visualization.
David Edward Reichle is an American ecologist who worked at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and is known for his pioneering research on the movement of radionuclides in the environment and the carbon metabolism of forest ecosystems. From 1967 to 1981 he was co-chair of Woodlands for the International Biological Programme. He served as Director of ORNL’s Environmental Sciences Division (1986-1990) and retired in 2000 as Associate Director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His advanced text, The Global Carbon Cycle and Climate Change: scaling ecological energetics from the organism to the biosphere was published in 2020.
