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 Lanchester Laws 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 Netlogo wolf-sheep model (docked).