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ZENODO
Journal . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: ZENODO
ZENODO
Journal . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: Datacite
ZENODO
Journal . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: Datacite
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Ecosystem-scale Umwelt:Monadic Agents, Primary Signal Substrates,and Trans-Umwelt Translation in a Sensor-Network Instantiation

Authors: Eismann, Amir;

Ecosystem-scale Umwelt:Monadic Agents, Primary Signal Substrates,and Trans-Umwelt Translation in a Sensor-Network Instantiation

Abstract

Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt (1934) — the species-specific perceptual world that an organism inhabits — has been productively scaled above the individual organism over the past two decades by the Tartu biosemiotic programme: as the “Total Umwelt” of a conspecific group (Tønnessen 2003; Lewis 2020), as the “ecosemiosphere” of a multispecies ecosystem (Maran 2021), and as the “umweb” of inter-organism sign-relations (Kull 2023). Each of these scale-up moves is compositional: the ecosystem-scale entity is built out of constituent organism-Umwelten. I propose a different move. I treat the ecosystem itself as a single Umwelt-bearing agent that reads its environment through one primary signal substrate (e.g. aragonite saturation, snow-on-ice, bark lichen community composition). Cross-ecosystem dialogue is then trans-Umwelt translation, in the sense of Kull & Torop’s “biotranslation” (2003), but with ecosystem-agents as the units that translate. The empirical case is an artificial nine-agent AI implementation in which each ecosystem is voiced by an LLM-grounded persona reading from a domain-specific Neo4j knowledge graph. I claim three contributions distinct from the existing compositional scale-up: (i) the monadic, single-substrate characterisation of each ecosystem-agent; (ii) inter-agent translation as the operative mode of the network rather than an analytical comparison; and (iii) the AI/sensor-network instantiation as the case that makes the framing operational and testable. I position the proposal against Maran’s ecosemiosphere, Kull’s umweb, Kohn’s “thinking forest” (2013), and Parmiggiani & Monteiro’s STS treatment of sensor networks as perceptual apparatus (2018), and I sketch what would falsify each claim.

Keywords

biosemiotics, nature, ecology, artificial intelligence

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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
0
Average
Average
Average