Related papers: Stephenson et al.'s ecological fallacy
Respiration measurements of whole tree plants have been reported that give evidence that the relative per volume/mass unit respiration decreases with increase of tree body size. In this study, based on the available data published a…
In order to study the statistics of the objects with hierarchical merging, we propose the skeleton tree formalism, which can analytically distinguish the episodic merging and the continuous accretion in the mass growth processes. The…
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…
The theory of transient growth describes how linear mechanisms can cause temporary amplification of disturbances even when the linearized system is asymptotically stable as defined by its eigenvalues. This growth is traditionally quantified…
We consider branching processes with interaction in continuous time, both with values in the integers and in the reals (in the second case we restrict ourselves to continuous processes), which model the evolution of the size of a…
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…
The rising complexity of our terrestrial surrounding is an empirical fact. Details of this process evaded description in terms of physics for long time attracting attention and creating myriad of ideas including non-scientific ones. In this…
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 mathematical population genetics, it is well known that one can represent the genealogy of a population by a tree, which indicates how the ancestral lines of individuals in the population coalesce as they are traced back in time. As the…
What are the general principles that allow proper growth of a tissue or an organ? A growing leaf is an example of such a system: it increases its area by orders of magnitude, maintaining a proper (usually flat) shape. How can this be…
A well-established model for the genealogy of a large population in equilibrium is Kingman's coalescent. For the population together with its genealogy evolving in time, this gives rise to a time-stationary tree-valued process. We study the…
We study the behaviour of a natural measure defined on the leaves of the genealogical tree of some branching processes, namely self-similar growth-fragmentation processes. Each particle, or cell, is attributed a positive mass that evolves…
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…
Different statistical samples (e.g., from different locations) offer populations and learning systems observations with distinct statistical properties. Samples under (1) 'Unconfounded' growth preserve systems' ability to determine the…
The contradiction between physical and economical sciences concerning the growth of the production/consumption mechanism is analyzed. It is then shown that if one wishes to keep the security level stable or to enhance it in a growing…
Patches of vegetation consist of dense clusters of shrubs, grass, or trees, often found to be circular characteristic size, defined by the properties of the vegetation and terrain. Therefore, vegetation patches can be interpreted as…
Natural selection has produced an extraordinary diversity of life histories spanning many orders of magnitude in body size, vital rates, and biological times. In general, big and cold organisms grow and reproduce slowly and live long lives;…
Empirical observations suggest that in pure even-aged forests, the mean diameter of forest trees (D, diameter at breast height, 1.3 m above ground) tends to remain a constant proportion of stand height (H, average height of the largest…
Ecological communities exhibit pervasive patterns and inter-relationships between size, abundance, and the availability of resources. We use scaling ideas to develop a unified, model-independent framework for understanding the distribution…
Growth-fragmentation processes describe the evolution of systems of cells which grow continuously and fragment suddenly; they are used in models of cell division and protein polymerisation. Typically, we may expect that in the long run, the…