NEA.m

Performs network environ analysis on network models of energy-matter flow and storage.

Network Environ Analysis (NEA) is a formal, quantitative methodology to describe an object's within system environment (Patten 1978). It provides a perspective of the environment, based on general systems theory and input-output analysis. This approach is one type of a more general conceptual approach called ecological network analysis. Application of Network Environ Analysis on ecosystem models has revealed several important and unexpected results, which have been identified and summarized in the literature as network environ properties. To conduct the analysis one needs system data including the intercompartmental flows, compartmental storages, and boundary input and output flows. The software presented herein uses these data to perform the main network environ analyses and environ properties including unit environs, indirect effects ratio, network homogenization, network synergism, network mutualism, mode partitioning, and environ control.

This function, created by Brian Fath and Stuart Borrett, returns a vector of network statistics and environ properties to the workspace and saves resultant matrices in a file called 'NEA_output.mat'. These results can be loaded into the workspace using the load command. See comments in the program for more detials.