The paper focuses on the semiotic principles of the organisation of ecosystems, attempting to find concepts that point to relations and not to elements. (1) Consortium (the term introduced by Johannes Reinke around 1873) can be defined as a group of organisms connected via (sign) relations, or groups of interspecific semiosic links in biocoenosis. The consortial relations include trophic and topic relations, both implying a recognition (identification) of the object by an organism involved (these, i.e., are sign relations). These relations (...) are ecologically inheritable. (2) Umwelt (the term introduced by Jakob von Uexküll around 1909) can be defined as a set of relations an organism has in an ecosystem (as in a semiosphere). The formation of an umwelt is dependent on the modelling system of the organism. (3) Biophony (the term introduced by Bernie Krause around 2000) denotes the coordination of inter- and intra-species relations in a soundscape of a biological community. This can be seen as a special case of Komposition as defined by Jakob and Thure von Uexküll. (4) Ecological code (as introduced, e.g. by Alexander Levich around 1977) can be defined as the set of (sign) relations (regular irreducible correspondences) characteristic to an entire ecosystem. We also mention the concepts of ecomones and coactones (introduced by Marcel Florkin in 1965) as the substances which are responsible for mediation of ecological inter-individual relations. All the relations as sign-relations evidently imply both a static or structuralist description (in terms of codes), and a processual description (in terms of semiosis carried on by interpretation). We conclude that all the above mentioned concepts can be viewed as conceptually connected and are suitable for semiotic description of biological communities. (shrink)

Describing resources and their relationships with organisms seems to be a useful approach to a ‘unified ecology’, contributing to fill the gap between natural and human oriented processes, and opening new perspectives in dealing with biological complexity. This Resource Criterion defines the main properties of resources, describes the mechanisms that link them to individual species, and gives a particular emphasis to the biosemiotic approach that allows resources to be identified inside a heterogeneous ecological medium adopting the eco-field model. In particular, (...) this Criterion allows to couple matter, structured energy and information composing the ecological systems to the biosemiotic and cognitive mechanisms adopted by individual species to track resources, transforming neutral surroundings into meaningful species-specific Umwelten. The expansion of the human semiotic niche that is a relevant evolutionary process of the present time, assigns the role of powerful and efficient agency to the Resources Criterion to evaluate the effect of human intrusion into the natural systems with habits of key stone species, under the challenge of a growing use of alloctonous, immaterial and symbolic resources of the actual globalized societal models. The Resource Criterion interprets the ecological dynamics contributing to complete the epistemology of the ecology, to open a bridge toward economy and other societal sciences, and to contribute to formulate a General Theory of Resources. (shrink)