  Nevertheless, what is somewhat philosophically troubling about the use of GIS in ecology is the conceptualization and representation of geographical information as: (a) a linked set of places, linked in the sense that the places must maintain fully precise adjacency relations; but (b) an unlinked set of attributes (for instance, the presence or absence of species or other biological features). There is something disarmingly natural about this: it certainly seems to capture the geographical rootedness in place that lies at the basis of planning for biodiversity conservation. But this choice of representation has its costs: the mode of representation which is at the core of GIS makes it “natural” to represent systems in such a way that certain types of relationships tend to get lost, or at least relegated to the background, while others receive emphasis. Consider the following example. Carnivores cannot be present at any place unless prey species also exist. This trivial and obvious ecological fact cannot be explicitly represented using the standard resources of any GIS package (that is, it cannot be represented without writing special programs).  Attributes are represented without relations between them. This encourages, though does not require, analyses that do not use relations between attributes. (Obviously, one can start with a GIS-based representation and add other relations as part of the superstructure of the model.) Philosophers of science have long known that modes of representation influence the introduction and development of conceptual systems based on them. GIS may have such an influence through representational choices that guides ecology down a path where relations between attributes receive less emphasis than they would in traditional ecological models.