Ecosystem is treated as an energy transducer, the input of which is solar radiation and the output is thermal energy. Three approaches from three different aspects of the ecosystem, structure, stability and efficiency are applied and developed. The most of the part [I] concerns to structure, where a new graphical index that measures quantitatively the food web structure is introduced. The last section of the part [I] and the whole of the part [II] are devoted to the stability, where after a concise review of the stability theorems, fairly powerful stability criteria with respect to the looped and nonlooped food webs are given in detail and furthermore the stability of the spatial distribution is discussed. As to the efficiency, a new treatment is proposed and developed all over this article, especially in part [III], which insists that the time change of the ecosystem is divided into two processes, one of which is dynamical process during short time scale and the other is successional process during long time scale, and that the successional process proceeds so as to minimize the Margalef's gross turn over rate. According to this new treatment, various quantities of model system are calculated and compared with the field data of Silver Springs by Odum.
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Ashida et al. (1977) studied this question.