Related papers: Self-Similarity and Scaling in Forest Communities
Tree-size distribution is one of the most investigated subjects in plant population biology. The forestry literature reports that tree-size distribution trajectories vary across different stands and/or species, while the metabolic scaling…
Scaling laws in ecology, intended both as functional relationships among ecologically-relevant quantities and the probability distributions that characterize their occurrence, have long attracted the interest of empiricists and…
Models at various levels of resolution are commonly used, both for forest management and in ecological research. They all have comparative advantages and disadvantages, making desirable a better understanding of the relationships between…
Natural ecosystems are characterized by striking diversity of form and functions and yet exhibit deep symmetries emerging across scales of space, time and organizational complexity. Species-area relationships and species-abundance…
In the face of uncertain biological response to climate change and the many critiques concerning model complexity it is increasingly important to develop predictive mechanistic frameworks that capture the dominant features of ecological…
Ecological spatial patterns reflect the underlying processes that shape the structure of species and communities. Mechanisms like inter and intra species competition, dispersal and host-pathogen interactions are believed to act over a wide…
A new model ecosystem consisting of many interacting species is introduced. The species are connected through a random matrix with a given connectivity. It is shown that the system is organized close to a boundary of marginal stability in…
Concerns about biodiversity and the long-term stability of forest ecosystems have lead to changing attitudes with respect to plantations. These artificial communities are ubiquitous, yet provide reduced habitat value in comparison to their…
Inferring the processes underlying the emergence of observed patterns is a key challenge in theoretical ecology. Much effort has been made in the past decades to collect extensive and detailed information about the spatial distribution of…
Tropical rainforests exhibit a rich repertoire of spatial patterns emerging from the intricate relationship between the microscopic interaction between species. In particular, the distribution of vegetation clusters can shed much light on…
Fire is an indissoluble component of ecosystems, however quantifying the effects of fire on vegetation is challenging task as fire lies outside the typical experimental design attributes. A recent simulation study showed that under…
Ecology studies biodiversity in its variety and complexity. It describes how species distribute and perform in response to environmental changes. Ecological processes and structures are highly complex and adaptive. In order to quantify…
Many outputs of cities scale in universal ways, including infrastructure, crime, and economic activity. Through a mathematical model, this study investigates the interplay between such scaling laws in human organization and governmental…
Emergence of self-similarity in hierarchical community structures is ubiquitous in complex systems. Yet, there is a dearth of universal quantification and general principles describing the formation of such structures. Here, we discover…
Understanding the causes and effects of spatial vegetation patterns is a fundamental problem in ecology, especially because these can be used as early predictors of catastrophic shifts such as desertification processes. Empirical studies of…
Resource-scale quantification of energy in water supplies is a basis for regional-scale governance of water systems and national- and global-scale assessments of the "water-energy-emission" nexus. But a physically based approach for this…
Over the last few decades, ecologists have come to appreciate that key ecological patterns, which describe ecological communities at relatively large spatial scales, are not only scale dependent, but also intimately intertwined. The…
Fires and rainfall are major mechanisms that regulate woody and grassy biomasses in savanna ecosystems. Conditions of long-lasting coexistence of trees and grasses have been mainly studied using continuous-time modelling of tree-grass…
Forest-fire waiting times, defined as the time between successive events above a certain size in a given region, are calculated for Italy. The probability densities of the waiting times are found to verify a scaling law, despite that fact…
One of the first beings affected by changes in the climate are trees, one of our most vital resources. In this study tree species interaction and the response to climate in different ecological environments is observed by applying a joint…