Related papers: Environmental Physics: Physical Principles and App…
The climate system is a forced, dissipative, nonlinear, complex and heterogeneous system that is out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The system exhibits natural variability on many scales of motion, in time as well as space, and it is subject…
A reliable understanding of the Earth system is essential for the life quality of modern society. Natural hazards are the cause of most life and resource losses. The ability to define the conditions for a sustainable development of…
A hydrodynamic formulation of the evolution of large-scale structure in the Universe is presented. It relies on the spatially coarse-grained description of the dynamical evolution of a many-body gravitating system. Because of the assumed…
The climate is a forced and dissipative nonlinear system featuring non-trivial dynamics of a vast range of spatial and temporal scales. The understanding of the climate's structural and multiscale properties is crucial for the provision of…
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…
Life is characterized by a myriad of complex dynamic processes allowing organisms to grow, reproduce, and evolve. Physical approaches for describing systems out of thermodynamic equilibrium have been increasingly applied to living systems,…
Main aim of this topical issue is to report recent advances in noisy nonequilibrium processes useful to describe the dynamics of ecological systems and to address the mechanisms of spatio-temporal pattern formation in ecology both from the…
The observed general time-asymmetric behavior of macroscopic systems -- embodied in the second law of thermodynamics -- arises naturally from time-symmetric microscopic laws due to the great disparity between macro and micro-scales. More…
Spatio-temporal processes in environmental applications are often assumed to follow a Gaussian model, possibly after some transformation. However, heterogeneity in space and time might have a pattern that will not be accommodated by…
Motivated by the results of recent laboratory experiments (Yoshida et al. Nature, 424, 303-306 (2003)) as well as many earlier field observations that evolutionary changes can take place in ecosystems over relatively short ecological time…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
Complex systems are characterized by specific time-dependent interactions among their many constituents. As a consequence they often manifest rich, non-trivial and unexpected behavior. Examples arise both in the physical and non-physical…
Physicists face major challenges in modelling multi-scale phenomena that are observed in geophysical flows (e.g. in the Earth's oceans and atmosphere, or liquid planetary cores). In particular, complexities arise because geophysical fluids…
We discuss the relevance of studying ecology within the framework of Complexity Science from a statistical mechanics approach. Ecology is concerned with understanding how systems level properties emerge out of the multitude of interactions…
Earth's atmosphere has evolved as volatile species cycle between the atmosphere, ocean, biomass and the solid Earth. The geochemical, biological and astrophysical processes that control atmospheric evolution are reviewed from an "Earth…
Apparent biodiversity on earth exists only if we compare different species separated from their environments. Meanwhile coexisting species have to be identical in terms of energetic interactions. Consider the biosphere as a network of…
A vast concourse of events and phenomena occur in nature that may be interrelated by a entropy-maximization technique that provides a comprehensible explanation of a range of physical problems, integrating in a new framework the universal…
Nature's many varied complex systems (including galaxies, stars, planets, life, and society) are islands of order within the increasingly disordered universe. All organized systems are subject to physical, biological or cultural evolution,…
In complex systems, the interplay between nonlinear and stochastic dynamics, e.g., J. Monod's necessity and chance, gives rise to an evolutionary process in Darwinian sense, in terms of discrete jumps among attractors, with punctuated…
Throughout the history of science, physics-based modeling has relied on judiciously approximating observed dynamics as a balance between a few dominant processes. However, this traditional approach is mathematically cumbersome and only…