La Profilée - The Ecology Programme: A Structural Audit of Persistence and Identity Across Ecological Science

Abstract

La Profilée is a universal structural law of persistence under transformation. Ecology is a proof domain: its systems are natural, bound by the law, and a deviation would falsify it rather than reveal a design flaw. It occupies a distinctive place among the natural domains because its objects sit at the edge of individuality. A population, a community, an ecosystem — each persists through continuous change, yet whether each is one persisting thing rather than an aggregate of smaller ones is contested within ecology itself. This makes ecology the domain where the existence verdict (Q1) is hardest and most instructive, and where the difference between a persister and a heap is not a philosopher’s puzzle but a working question with management consequences. This catalogue does for ecology what the Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Cognition, and Immunology Programme Catalogues do for their domains. It is an audit register: where established ecology already applies an identity or persistence criterion without stating one, what follows when the criterion is made explicit, and what status each finding carries. The four-step protocol is unchanged. Present the ecology completely without the law; audit it for implicit persistence and identity structure; insert the law explicitly; catalogue the consequences by class. Relation to the Biology catalogue. The Biology Programme Catalogue treats ecology as one facet of biological persistence, in a handful of modules under BR-6 (population as persister, regime shift as transmutation, keystone as frame element). This catalogue treats ecology as a domain in its own right, with its full programme breadth: the individuality question, stability and resilience, regime shifts, the niche, succession, diversity, and the boundary problem. The biology modules are the contact points, not the coverage. A caution proper to this domain. Ecology’s system boundaries are genuinely unsettled — what counts as one ecosystem is disputed on ecological grounds, not only on structural ones. This makes the Q1 verdict the load-bearing one throughout, and the catalogue treats it as the first question rather than assuming it. Where a claim depends on a boundary that ecology has not fixed, that dependence is stated rather than hidden. The no-content rule holds. Nothing here derives a species, a food web, a trophic level, or a biogeochemical cycle. These are realizations, and they appear only as the reading of forced abstract structure.