# Organisms as Ecosystem Engineers

*Jones · Ecological · Oikos · 1994 · Paywalled*

The paper that coined the term ecosystem engineers and gave the substrate-as-artefact argument its modern vocabulary. Jones, Lawton and Shachak point out that ecology had organised itself almost entirely around trophic relations, who eats whom and who competes with whom, and had no framework for a different class of effects: organisms that create, modify or maintain habitats, changing the availability of resources to other species not by consuming them but by physically changing materials and structures. Their distinction is between autogenic engineers, which change the environment through their own living and dead tissue (trees, corals, sphagnum building peat), and allogenic engineers, which transform materials from one state to another (beavers building dams, earthworms making soil, the canonical case the paper takes directly from Darwin). The claim that matters for this corpus is that engineering effects persist beyond the engineer: the dam outlasts the beaver, the soil outlasts the worm, so present inhabitants live in conditions deposited by past life, which is the substrate argument stated as general ecology. Organisationally the reading is direct: processes, tools, norms and the built communicative environment are engineered habitat, produced by the ordinary activity of previous occupants and constraining what can now grow, and the one who shapes the habitat governs without issuing a command. The critical read was supplied early and is worth carrying: the concept was accused of being so broad as to include every organism, since all living things modify their surroundings somehow, and the authors themselves conceded the point while arguing that breadth of occurrence does not mean uniformity of importance, and later work formalised when engineering effects are large. Read alongside Darwin for the founding case and Laland and colleagues for the evolutionary extension.

- **This page:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/jones-lawton-shachak-1994/
- **View the source paper:** https://doi.org/10.2307/3545850
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## Neighbours (5)

- [Rewetting Organisations](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/rewetting-organisations.md)
- [The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/darwin-1881.md) (paper)
- [An Introduction to Niche Construction Theory](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/laland-matthews-feldman-2016.md) (paper)
- [Five Ecological Concepts](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/five-ecological-concepts-for-working-in-organisational-change.md)
- [Safety Organised Criticality](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/safety-organised-criticality-socy.md)