Resumen

OLESCHKO, Klavdia; FIGUEROA-SANDOVAL, Benjamín; KORVIN, Gabor  y  MARTINEZ-MENES, Mario. Agroecometry: a toolbox for the design of virtual agriculture. agric. soc. desarro [online]. 2004, vol.1, n.1, pp.53-71. ISSN 1870-5472.

Agriculture has rarely been an area of great attraction for technological and scientific innovations. Nevertheless, as there is evidently a risk of a non-sustainable management of agroecosystems, it is necessary to use better the technological opportunities. One of these oportunities is to use the advances in of high-yield computation (and in parallel) mathematical modeling in order to unify the information data bases (Smith et al., 2002), that arise in areas as diverse as the study of natural resources, economics, and sociology, or rural revelopment, aiming them towards a common purpose. The objective of this study was to answer one specific question: Is there a way to measure the structural patterns of the physical, chemical, and biological systems as well as the economic and social structural patterns with one and the same variable, and visualize their competitive contribution to the sustainability of an agroecosystem? We have constructed the mathematical bases and those of computer simulation to answer the aforementioned questions and to introduce a new discipline to agricultural sciences, whose theoretic-methodological frame seems promising in the field of unification of the extensive, multifaceted information. This new discipline which we call Agroecometry, has as its fundamental objetive to construct metric spaces effective for agricultural sciences, and visualize the performance of an agroecosystem in all its the richness its in the frame of virtual model.

Palabras llave : Agroecosystems; Mathematical modeling; Virtual model.