Related papers: Analytical Models of Forest Dynamics
Theoretical ecologists have long sought to understand how the persistence of populations depends on biotic and abiotic factors. Classical work showed that demographic stochasticity causes the mean time to extinction to increase…
Ecosystems often undergo abrupt regime shifts in response to gradual external changes. These shifts are theoretically understood as a regime switch between alternative stable states of the ecosystem dynamical response to smooth changes in…
The statistical properties of an ecosystem composed of species interacting via pairwise, random interactions and deterministic, concentration limiting self-interaction are studied analytically with tools of equilibrium statistical mechanics…
Interpretation of empirical results based on a taxa's lifetime distribution shows apparently conflicting results. Species' lifetime is reported to be exponentially distributed, whereas higher order taxa, such as families or genera, follow a…
In this paper, we present the description of a simplified model of the dynamic of a mono-specific even-aged forest. The model studied is a tree-growth model based on a system of two ordinary differential equations concerning the tree basal…
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…
Quantifying long-term historical climate is fundamental to understanding recent climate change. Most instrumentally recorded climate data are only available for the past 200 years, so proxy observations from natural archives are often…
The stability and ability of an ecosystem to withstand climate change is directly linked to its biodiversity. Dead trees are a key indicator of overall forest health, housing one-third of forest ecosystem biodiversity, and constitute 8%of…
Based on decision trees, many fields have arguably made tremendous progress in recent years. In simple words, decision trees use the strategy of "divide-and-conquer" to divide the complex problem on the dependency between input features and…
We develop a landscape-flux framework to investigate observed frequency distributions of vegetation and the stability of these ecological systems under fluctuations. The frequency distributions can characterize the population-potential…
We investigate a forest-fire model with the density of empty sites as control parameter. The model exhibits three phases, separated by one first-order phase transition and one 'mixed' phase transition which shows critical behavior on only…
The extinction of species is a core process that affects the diversity of life on Earth. One way of investigating the causes and consequences of extinctions is to build conceptual ecological models, and to use the dynamical outcomes of such…
The first chapter concerns monotype population models. We first study general birth and death processes and we give non-explosion and extinction criteria, moment computations and a pathwise representation. We then show how different scales…
A central feature of complex systems is the relevance and entanglement of different levels of description. For instance, the dynamics of ecosystems can be alternatively described in terms of large ecological processes and classes of…
A class of models of biological population and communities with a singular equilibrium at the origin is analyzed; it is shown that these models can possess a dynamical regime of deterministic extinction, which is crucially important from…
A dynamical model of an ecological community is analyzed within a "mean-field approximation" in which one of the species interacts with the combination of all of the other species in the community. Within this approximation the model may be…
Discrete time, spatially extended models play an important role in ecology, modelling population dynamics of species ranging from micro-organisms to birds. An important question is how 'bottom up', individual-based models can be…
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…
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…
Ecological patterns arise from the interplay of many different processes, and yet the emergence of consistent phenomena across a diverse range of ecological systems suggests that many patterns may in part be determined by statistical or…