Related papers: Joint assessment of density correlations and fluct…
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…
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…
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…
A mass ejection model in a time-dependent random environment with both temporal and spatial correlations is introduced. When the environment has a finite correlation length, individual particle trajectories are found to diffuse at large…
Taylor's power law (TL) or fluctuation scaling has been verified empirically for the abundances of many species, human and non-human, and in many other fields including physics, meteorology, computer science, and finance. TL asserts that…
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…
Understanding the relationship between complexity and stability in large dynamical systems -- such as ecosystems -- remains a key open question in complexity theory which has inspired a rich body of work developed over more than fifty…
The ecological principle of limiting similarity dictates that species similar in resource requirements will compete, with the superior eventually excluding the inferior competitor from the community. The observation that nonetheless…
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…
A complex two-parameter model resembling the classical voter model is introduced to describe macroecological properties of tropical tree communities. Monte-Carlo type computer simulations are performed on the model, investigating species…
One of the first successes of neutral ecology was to predict realistically-broad distributions of rare and abundant species. However, it has remained an outstanding theoretical challenge to describe how this distribution of abundances…
There is mounting empirical evidence that many communities of living organisms display key features which closely resemble those of physical systems at criticality. We here introduce a minimal model framework for the dynamics of a community…
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…
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…
Determining the relative importance of environmental factors, biotic interactions and stochasticity in assembling and maintaining species-rich communities remains a major challenge in ecology. In plant communities, interactions between…
Taylor's fluctuation scaling (FS) has been observed in many natural and man-made systems revealing an amazing universality of the law. Here we give strong theoretical foundations for the origins and abundance of Taylor's FS in different…
In hierarchical models, density fluctuations on different scales are correlated. This induces correlations between dark halo masses, their formation histories, and their larger-scale environments. In turn, this produces a correlation…
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.,…
Understanding the assembly of ecosystems to estimate the number of species at different spatial scales is a challenging problem. Until now, maximum entropy approaches have lacked the important feature of considering space in an explicit…
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…