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Center for Informatics Research
on Complexity in Ecology

research centre at Aarhus University

  • ABOUT

CIRCE is a research centre established at Aarhus University in 2012 to study the importance of complexity for how ecosystems function and respond to environmental change, by employing an informatics approach, analysing large ecological data sets using advanced statistical and mechanistic modelling.

CIRCE will focus on three major complexity factors:

  • species interactions

  • dispersal

  • environmental variability

                      PUBLICITY related to the CIRCE project

                    

 

Importance

Humans live within complex cultural and natural systems, and this complexity is a key challenge for all individuals and societies. Ecosystems exemplify this, as they are highly complex in structure and function. Scientists have long struggled to understand causes and consequences of this complexity. Today’s environmental upheaval makes this critical, as complexity may control how ecosystems respond to change. At the same time informatics-based methodologies (cyberinfrastructure, GIS, statistics etc.) provide unprecedented possibilities for breakthroughs, exploiting rapid increases in data and computing power and linked conceptual progress.