 Conditions for patchiness in plankton modelsFabio Della Rossa, Stefano Fasani and Sergio Rinaldi Theoretical Population Biology, 2013, vol. 83, issue C, 95-100 Abstract: Plankton patchiness in homogeneous physical environments is studied in this paper assuming that all involved populations disperse diffusively. A recent but powerful sufficient condition for the emergence of spatial patterns in models with any number of species is systematically applied to all food chain and food web plankton models and the result is rather sharp: all models explicitly containing phytoplankton, zooplankton and planktivorous fish suggest zooplankton patchiness, while models not containing phytoplankton or fish populations do not. The results are in agreement with many previous but particular theoretical studies on plankton patchiness and Turing instability, and a testable prediction of the models satisfying the sufficient predictions is that zooplankton should be more patchy than phytoplankton, a property that is often seen in natural settings. An application to a complex model with five compartments (nutrient, phytoplankton, zooplankton, planktivorous fish, carnivorous fish) highlights the predictive power of the method. Keywords: Plankton patchiness; Plankton models; Diffusive instability; Turing instability; Dispersal; Spatial pattern (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:thpobi:v:83:y:2013:i:c:p:95-100 DOI: 10.1016/j.tpb.2012.10.003 Access Statistics for this article Theoretical Population Biology is currently edited by Jeremy Van Cleve More articles in Theoretical Population Biology from Elsevier |
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