The philosophy of ecology raises epistemological and ontological issues of its own. One standing
ontological concern is ecosystem individuation. Whether ecosystems are individually ontologically
fundamental entities or have no ontological status over and above their parts may have, for instance, implications for how we construe their spatial and temporal boundaries, their resilience to
perturbations, and thus, ultimately, ecosystem management.
In this talk, I present an alternative to the zero-sum game of the individualism-holism dichotomy
for ecosystems. By utilizing “integrated information” as a gradient measure of system coherence
and individuation, we can instead construe different ecosystems as more and less individuated.