相关论文: Stephenson et al.'s ecological fallacy

Quantitative single cell measurements have shown that cell cycle duration (the time between cell divisions) for diverse cell types is a noisy variable. The underlying distribution is mean scalable with a universal shape for many cell types…

Numerous urban indicators scale with population in a power law across cities, but whether the cross-sectional scaling law is applicable to the temporal growth of individual cities is unclear. Here we first find two paradoxical scaling…

Mast fruiting represents a synchronous population behaviour which can spread on large landscape areas. This reproductive pattern is generally perceived as a synchronous periodic production of large seed crops and has a significant practical…

Earth system tipping elements have been predominantly investigated for their potential to trigger \textit{negative} ecological, climatic, and societal shifts. Yet, an overlooked but seminal avenue exists in the form of \textit{positive}…

Many growth processes lead to intriguing stochastic patterns and complex fractal structures which exhibit local scale invariance properties. Such structures can often be described effectively by space-time trajectories of interacting…

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…

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…

The reconstruction of a central tendency `species tree' from a large number of conflicting gene trees is a central problem in systematic biology. Moreover, it becomes particularly problematic when taxon coverage is patchy, so that not all…

The dynamics of linear stochastic growth equations on growing substrates is studied. The substrate is assumed to grow in time following the power law $t^\gamma$, where the growth index $\gamma$ is an arbitrary positive number. Two different…

The diameter distribution of a given species of deciduous trees in mature, temperate zone forests is well approximated by a Gamma distribution. Here we give new experimental evidence for this conjecture by analyzing deciduous tree size data…

Relating forest productivity to local variations in forest structure has been a long-standing challenge. Previous studies often focused on the connection between forest structure and stand-level photosynthesis (GPP). However, biomass…

A natural similarity in body dimensions of terrestrial animals noticed by ancient philosophers remains the main key to the problem of mammalian skeletal evolution with body mass explored in theoretical and experimental biology and tested by…

The roots of some coastal and wetland trees grow peculiar vertical protrusions, the function of which remains unclear. Here, using computational simulations based on first-principles fluid and sedimentation dynamics, we argue that the…

Concerns about biodiversity and the long-term stability of forest ecosystems have lead to changing attitudes with respect to plantations. These artificial communities are ubiquitous, yet provide reduced habitat value in comparison to their…

The problem of error growth due to the incomplete knowledge of the evolution law which rules the dynamics of a given physical system is addressed. Major interest is devoted to the analysis of error amplification in systems with many…

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…

The report considers the dynamics of the global population as the unique case of the Socio-Economic Soft Matter system. This category was introduced for complex systems dominated by mesoscale assemblies, emerging due to the inherent…

We investigate extremal statistical properties such as the maximal and the minimal heights of randomly generated binary trees. By analyzing the master evolution equations we show that the cumulative distribution of extremal heights…

Using demographic data of high spatial resolution for a region in the south of Europe, we study the population over fixed-size spatial cells. We find that, counterintuitively, the distribution of the number of inhabitants per cell increases…

Shape is one of the important characteristics for the structures observed in living organisms. Whereas biologists have proposed models where the shape is controlled on a molecular level [1], physicists, following Turing [2] and d'Arcy…