Related papers: The glocal forest
The widespread occurrence of an inverse square relation in the hierarchical distribution of sub-communities within communities (or sub-species within species) has been recently invoked as a signature of hierarchical self-organization within…
Clustering is a fundamental approach to understanding data patterns, wherein the intuitive Euclidean distance space is commonly adopted. However, this is not the case for implicit cluster distributions reflected by qualitative attribute…
Due to climatic changes, excessive grazing, and deforestation, semi-arid and arid ecosystems are vulnerable to desertification and land degradation. As aridity increases, vegetation cover often self-organizes into spatial patterns before…
In social-ecological systems (SESs), social and biophysical dynamics interact within and between structural levels separated by spatial and temporal scales. Cross-scale interactions (CSIs) are interdependences between processes at different…
Spatial ecological networks are widely used to model interactions between georeferenced biological entities (e.g., populations or communities). The analysis of such data often leads to a two-step approach where groups containing similar…
Diversity patterns of tree species in a tropical forest community are approached by a simple lattice model and investigated by Monte Carlo simulations using a backtracking method. Our spatially explicit neutral model is based on a simple…
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…
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…
In many data scientific problems, we are interested in inferring causal relationships in the data generating mechanism. Here, we consider the following real-world question: how has the Colombian conflict influenced tropical forest loss?…
We propose a model equation for the dynamics of tree density in mesic savannas. It considers long-range competition among trees and the effect of fire acting as a local facilitation mechanism. Despite short-range facilitation is taken to…
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…
Traditional approaches to ecosystem modelling have relied on spatially homogeneous approximations to interaction, growth and death. More recently, spatial interaction and dispersal have also been considered. While these leads to certain…
Previous work indicates that tropical forest can exist as an alternative stable state to savanna. Therefore, perturbation by climate change or human impact may lead to crossing of a tipping point beyond which there is rapid forest dieback…
Noise and spatial degrees of freedom characterize most ecosystems. Some aspects of their influence on the coevolution of populations with cyclic interspecies competition have been demonstrated in recent experiments [e.g. B. Kerr et al.,…
Nonuniform spatial distributions of vegetation in scarce environments consist of either gaps, bands often called tiger bush or patches that can be either self-organized or spatially localized in space. When the level of aridity is…
Eco-evolutionary frameworks can explain certain features of communities in which ecological and evolutionary processes occur over comparable timescales. Here, we investigate whether an evolutionary dynamics may interact with the spatial…
The spatial scale of population synchrony gives the characteristic distance at which the population fluctuations are correlated. Therefore, it gives also the characteristic size of the regions of simultaneous population depletion, or even…
Self-organized spatial patterns of vegetation are frequent in drylands and, because pattern shape correlates with water availability, they have been suggested as important indicators of ecosystem health. However, the mechanisms underlying…
Correlations among the independently measured physical properties of globular clusters (GCs) can provide powerful tests for theoretical models and new insights into their dynamics, formation, and evolution. We review briefly some of the…
From bird flocks to fish schools, animal groups often seem to react to environmental perturbations as if of one mind. Most studies in collective animal behaviour have aimed to understand how a globally ordered state may emerge from simple…