Ecological systems consist of interacting species populations constrained by environmental resources, habitat limits, and species tolerance ranges. Traditional ecological analysis focuses on population dynamics, trophic relationships, and environmental carrying capacity. This paper introduces a structural interpretation based on the Paton System. Within this framework, ecosystem persistence depends on the admissibility of species interactions and the reachability of ecological continuation trajectories under environmental constraints. An ecosystem continues to function only while at least one admissible coordination pathway remains available among interacting populations. When admissible interaction trajectories collapse, ecosystems transition toward fragmentation, species extinction, or systemic ecological collapse. This interpretation reframes ecological resilience as a structural admissibility problem rather than solely a population-dynamics problem. The result provides a domain-neutral structural account of ecosystem persistence consistent with previously established Paton System principles and extends the framework’s Tier-7 domain instantiations into ecological systems.
Andrew John Paton (Sun,) studied this question.