Introduction to Ecological Analysis

I'm looking for anyone who can provide a good introduction to ecology and ecological analysis. My research is on competition within the international system, and I would like to get a better understanding of how to analyze and theorize international politics as an evolving ecosystem. If anyone wants to take a shot a explaining this stuff to a social scientist please let me know.

Aaron

There a popular competitive equation used in ecology--Competitive Lotka-Volterra equations

I hope it is helpful. ^_^Wenyun Zuo

Wenyun - Thank you for the page. I've actually seen these equations before in combat modeling. In international relations, similar models called Lanchester Equations have used with mixed results. See [1] if you are interested.

Also, checkout the "docked" version of the system dynamics and agent based models of predator-prey models in Netlogo. Its fascinating to see how the different methodologies can get different results modeling the same problem (hint: you'll need additional information in order for the ABM to replicate the oscillations of the system dynamics model). See [2].