  A primary motivation for research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to
exploit the self-organising properties of natural ecosystems. Ecosystems arc
thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve
complex, dynamic problems. However, the biological processes that contribute to
these properties have not been made explicit in Digital Ecosystem research.
Here, we introduce how biological properties contribute to the self-organising
features of natural ecosystems. These properties include populations of
evolving agents, a complex dynamic environment, and spatial distributions which
generate local interactions. The potential for exploiting these properties in
artificial systems is then considered.
