The future of systems ecology
Main Article Content
Abstract
Question: What is the future of systems ecology in a rapidly changing world?
Contribution: Systems ecology can contribute by focusing on ecological systems in transformation and by extending systems thinking across biological scales.
Article Details

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors retain copyright in their articles. Articles are published by Systems Ecology under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
By agreeing to publication in Systems Ecology, the corresponding author, on behalf of all authors, confirms that the authors have the rights necessary to publish the work and authorizes Systems Ecology to publish it under CC BY 4.0. The corresponding author also confirms that any third-party material included in the article has been used with appropriate permission or under an applicable license, and that any material not covered by the article's CC BY 4.0 license is clearly identified.
References
Riskin, J. 2026. The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. New York: Riverhead Books.
Wulf, A. 2015. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Hammond, D. 2003. The Science of Synthesis: Exploring the Social Implications of General Systems Theory. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.
Haraway, D. J. 1976. Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Forrester, J. W. 1972. Industrial Dynamics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jørgensen, S. E. 2012. Introduction to Systems Ecology. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/b11877
Odum, H. T. 1983. Systems Ecology: An Introduction. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Evans, M. R., Norris, K. J., and Benton, T. G. 2012. Predictive ecology: systems approaches. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 367(1586):163–169. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2011.0191
Saavedra, S., and Kéfi, S. 2026. Open questions for systems ecology. Systems Ecology 1:001. https://doi.org/10.67837/2341
Armstrong McKay, D. I., et al. 2022. Exceeding 1.5 °C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points. Science 377(6611):eabn7950. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abn7950
Elsen, P. R., Saxon, E. C., Simmons, B. A., Ward, M., Williams, B. A., Grantham, H. S., Kark, S., Levin, N., Perez-Hammerle, K.-V., Reside, A. E., and Watson, J. E. M. 2022. Accelerated shifts in terrestrial life zones under rapid climate change. Global Change Biology 28:918–935. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15962
Sultan, S. E. 2015. Organism and Environment: Ecological Development, Niche Construction, and Adaptation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199587070.001.0001
Levins, R. 1993. A response to Orzack and Sober: formal analysis and the fluidity of science. The Quarterly Review of Biology 68(4):547–555. https://doi.org/10.1086/418302
Halabi, N., Rivoire, O., Leibler, S., and Ranganathan, R. 2009. Protein sectors: evolutionary units of three-dimensional structure. Cell 138(4):774–786. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2009.07.038
Haeger, A., Wolf, K., Zegers, M. M., and Friedl, P. 2015. Collective cell migration: guidance principles and hierarchies. Trends in Cell Biology 25(9):556–566. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tcb.2015.06.003
Mayor, R., and Etienne-Manneville, S. 2016. The front and rear of collective cell migration. Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology 17:97–109. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrm.2015.14
Gordon, D. M. 2016. From division of labor to the collective behavior of social insects. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 70:1101–1108. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-015-2045-3
O’Brien, L. E. 2022. Tissue homeostasis and non-homeostasis: from cell life cycles to organ states. Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology 38:395–418. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-cellbio-120420-114855
Bassett, D. S., and Bullmore, E. T. 2017. Small-world brain networks revisited. The Neuroscientist 23(5):499–516. https://doi.org/10.1177/1073858416667720
Gordon, D. M. 2014. The ecology of collective behavior. PLOS Biology 12(3):e1001805. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001805
Gordon, D. M. 2023. The Ecology of Collective Behavior. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691232164
Bissell, M. J., and Inman, J. 2008. Reprogramming stem cells is a microenvironmental task. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105(41):15637–15638. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0808457105
Paget, S. 1889. The distribution of secondary growths in cancer of the breast. The Lancet 1:571–573. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(00)49915-0
Fidler, I. J. 2003. The pathogenesis of cancer metastasis: the “seed and soil” hypothesis revisited. Nature Reviews Cancer 3:453–458. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrc1098
Noorbakhsh, J., Zhao, Z.-M., Russell, J. C., and Chuang, J. H. 2020. Treating cancer as an invasive species. Molecular Cancer Research 18(1):20–26. https://doi.org/10.1158/1541-7786.MCR-19-0262
Basanta, D., and Anderson, A. R. A. 2013. Exploiting ecological principles to better understand cancer progression and treatment. Interface Focus 3(4):20130020. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2013.0020
Adler, F. R. 2024. A modelling framework for cancer ecology and evolution. Journal of the Royal Society Interface 21:20240099. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2024.0099