CONCEPT
Resource Modulation
The defining mechanism of ecosystem engineering — engineers do not create resources; they alter the availability, timing, distribution, and accessibility of existing resources, and the regime shift is what transforms communities.
A foundational principle of Jones's framework that casual readers systematically misunderstand: ecosystem engineers do not create resources. The beaver does not create water. The water exists independently — it falls as precipitation, collects in tributaries, flows through the watershed according to topography and physics. What the beaver does is modulate the water's characteristics: velocity, depth, spatial distribution, temperature, nutrient load. The resource is the same. The regime is entirely different. And the regime, not the resource, determines what the ecosystem can support. Applied to AI, the distinction is clarifying: AI does not create intelligence. Intelligence — the cognitive capability of humans in the organization — exists independently of the tools. What AI does is modulate the regime under which that intelligence operates.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Jones, Lawton, and Shachak specified this mechanism in their 1997 paper on positive and negative effects. The paper distinguished direct resource provision, which is a different ecological process, from modulation of existing resource flows,