DAISY WORLD
Daisyworld is the name of a model developed by Andrew Watson and James Lovelock (published in 1983) to demonstrate how organisms could inadvertently regulate their environment. The model simulates a fictional planet (called Daisyworld) which is experiencing slow global warming due to the brightening of its star. The planet is populated by two species of daisies: black daisies and white daisies. The white daisies have a high albedo (reflectivity), and therefore have a cooling effect on the planet. The black daisies, on the other hand, have a low albedo (and thus absorb more solar radiation) and so have a warming effect on the planet. The daisies' growth rates depend on the temperature, and each daisy also affects its own microclimate in the same way as it affects the global climate. As a result, the populations of the two daisy species self-organize such that the planet remains near the optimal temperature of both daisy species (i.e. with more black daisies when the star is dimmer and more white daisies when the star is brighter). This model is called a parable because it was meant to illustrate how biotic processes could not only affect the environment (in this case the climate), but also stabilize the environment, without any planning or awareness on the part of the species involved.
Daisyworld (also sometimes referred to as "Daisy World"), has become a term of reference in evolutionary and population ecology. It derives from research on aspects of "coupling" between an ecosphere's biota and its planetary environment, in particular via mathematical modeling and computer simulation, research dating to a series of 1982-1983 symposia presentations and primary research reports by James E. Lovelock and colleagues aimed to address the plausibility of the Gaia hypothesis. Also later referred to as a modeling of geosphere–biosphere interactions, Lovelock's 1983 reports focused on a hypothetical planet with biota (in the original work, daisies) whose growth fluctuates as the planet's exposure to its star's rays fluctuate, i.e., a pair of daisy varieties, whose differing colours drive a difference in interaction with their environment (in particular, the star). Reference to Daisyworld types of experiments have come to more broadly refer to extensions of that early work, and to further hypothetical systems involving similar and unrelated species.
More specifically, given the impossibility of mathematically modeling the interactions of the full array of the biota of Earth with the full array of their environmental inputs, Lovelock introduced the idea of (and mathematical models and simulations approach to) a far simpler ecosystem—a planet at the lowest limit of its biota orbiting a star whose radiant energy was slowly changing—as a means to mimic a fundamental element of the interaction of all of the Earth's biota with the Sun. In the original 1983 works, Daisyworld made a wide variety of simplifying assumptions, and had white and black daisies as its only organisms, which were presented for their abilities to reflect or absorb light, respectively. The original simulation modeled the two daisy populations—which combined to determine the planet's overall reflective power (fraction of incident radiation reflected by its surface)—and Daisyworld's surface temperature, as a function of changes in the hypothetical star's luminosity; in doing so Lovelock demonstrated that the surface temperature of the simple Daisyworld system remained nearly constant over a broad range of solar fluctuations, a result of shifts in the populations of the two plant varieties.
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