BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

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YIELD (Maximum sustainable) 1)4)5)

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The concept of maximum sustainable yield is generally equilibrium-centered, i.e. based on the postulate that the population or system considered merely fluctuates between permanently stable limits, which will not be crossed.

However, as stated by C.S. HOLLING: "An equilibrium-centered view is essentially static and provides little insight into the transient behavior of systems that are not near the equilibrium. Natural, undisturbed systems are likely to be continually in a transient state; they will be equally so under the influence of man. As man's number and economic demands increase, his use of resources shifts equilibrium states and moves populations away from equilibria" (1976, p.73).

No vegetal, animal or human population exists isolated from its environment, partially made of other species. Thus, some disturbance affecting an apparently unrelated system, may well in due time propagate itself to the population under research. And it could do so in unforeseen ways, triggering wide divergences from the former equilibrium. It may for example lead the population under review to cross an instability threshold and, as a result, introduce bifurcations and a chaotic behavior. This explains why, for instance, overfishing of one species, followed by a population crash, may lead to a permanently depleted population: the global equilibrium has been permanently altered in a way detrimental to the species under focus.

Such situations start now to appear in widely different systems under the pressure of massive abuse by man.

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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