The standard dynamic energy budget model has no plausible alternatives

Sebastiaan A.L.M. Kooijman

Ecological Modelling, 2020, vol. 428, issue C

Abstract: During its 40 years of development, the assumptions of the Dynamic Energy Budget (deb) theory for metabolic organisation turned out hard to replace. To understand this, a reasoning is here presented for why its standard model has no alternatives with a comparable level of simplicity and will never have them. Energy and mass conservation rules are essential to quantify the eco-physiological development of an individual organism thermodynamically. These rules strongly constrain the mathematical modelling of this development. In combination with consistency with a small set of stylised empirical facts, the freedom of modelling the skeleton of the model is reduced to a single one: the standard deb model. This skeleton can, however, be extended in many different ways to capture particular ‘details’. The key-message of this paper is that the more simple metabolic models become, the more constraining are consistency conditions.

Keywords: Dynamic energy budget theory; Thermodynamics; Entropy dissipation; Canonical form; Uniqueness; Add-my-Pet (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecomod:v:428:y:2020:i:c:s0304380020301782

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2020.109106

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