(635a) Study of the Sustainability of An Integrated Ecosystem with Energy Considerations

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the study of sustainability. This is primarily due to the realization that the continuous sustenance of the current ecosystem is possible only if we carefully understand the implications of the policies that are being practiced. In the absence of informed decisions, there is a greater possibility that the ecosystem may be irrevocably damaged even leading to the extinction of several species. Thus, it is imperative to study the sustainability of the ecosystem before implementing any major policy changes. To do so, it is necessary to have a mathematical model corresponding to the ecosystem so that the sustainability of various species under different simulated scenarios can be understood. A model can be used to help in exploring sustainable environmental management strategies without the risk of experimenting with real ecosystems and with real people. Also, a model can be used to simulate over a long range of time which can be more than the lifetime of an average human being. Recently, a simple food web model was proposed to simulate the interactions of various components of an ecosystem. This model was used to study the sustainability of different components of the system based on user simulated scenarios. In particular, the proposed model consists of 12 components namely a human household(HH), a set of two carnivore's animals (C1,C2), a set of three herbivores animals (H1,H2,H3) and three plants (P1,P2,P3) in addition to a rudimentary industry (IS). A resource pool (RP) in the model was assumed to be the source of all the material requirements whereas an inaccessible resource pool (IRP) acted as a sink for the model. This model considered the various socio economic and legal aspects of an ecosystem. This model was assumed to be closed to mass and open to energy. However, this model did not include the energy considerations i.e., the components of the model were assumed to operate without the need of power. In this article, we overcome the above limitation by enhancing the 12 compartmental food web model to also account for the energy considerations in the system thereby making it represent more realistic scenarios. This is implemented by including a power plant (PP) which uses fuel from the inaccessible resource pool (IRP) to produce the power (P). The power plant makes use of the services of the human households in the form of labor. The power produced is supplied to various other compartments like the agricultural industry (P1), the human households and the rudimentary industry for their development and maintenance. The profit obtained by the selling of the power is distributed back to the human households. Figure 1 shows the various components of the model. In Figure 1, P2 is a state owned property whereas P1, H1, IS and PP are private firms. C1 is a protected species whereas P2, P3, H2, H3. The inclusion of the power plant adds power as a tradable commodity in addition to the products produced by the three other firms (P1, H1 and IS). Also, this provides an alternate source of employment to the human households. Thus, this model can help us to understand the sustainability in a more realistic scenario of energy considerations.