Jay Odenbaugh (Lewis & Clark College)
Along with (Maclaurin and Sterelny, 2008), I argued the best account of ecosystem functions are systemic capacity functions (Cummins, 1975). Two approaches to ecological function in ecosystem ecology have sprung up: the organizational account (Nunes-Neto et al., 2014) and the persistence account (Dussault and Bouchard, 2017). In this essay, I argue both the organizational and persistence accounts go beyond the minimalism of the systemic capacity account; ecosystem ecologists rarely provide evidence for an ecosystem's closure of constraints or propensity to persist respectively. Thus, we should accept the systemic capacity account if we are to make sense of the ecosystem functioning.
