. al 1979). Patten and colleagues developed network environ analysis (NEA) (Patten 1978,Barber et al. 1979, Fath and Patten 1999, Fath and Borrett 2006, Schramski 2006), a formof Ecological Network Analysis (ENA), to model the networks of complex ecologicalsystems. Affording particular mathematical and ecological interpretive advantages,NEA uniquely represents objects as simultaneously participating in the dual Page 14.902.2environments of both their incoming and outgoing networks. ENA and NEA inparticular reflect the organic holism of ecological systems and are built upon adeterministic premise. Recently, various thermodynamic goal functions