Random Walks, Fractals and the Origins of Rainforest Diversity

Ricard V. Solé and David Alonso
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Ricard V. Solé: Complex Systems Research Group, Dept. of Physics, FEN-UPC, Campus Nord B4, 08034 Barcelona, Spain
David Alonso: Dept. of Ecology, Facultat de Biologia, Univeristat de Barcelona, Diagonal 645, 08045 Barcelona, Spain

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 1998, vol. 01, issue 02n03, 203-220

Abstract: Rainforests are legendary because their extreme species richness. In the richest rain forests every second tree on a hectare is a differnt species. As a consequence, most species are rare. Using field data from studies in dfiferent parts of the world, we show that species-rich plots often display a distribution of number of speciesNs(I)represented byIindividuals with a power-law shapeNs(I)∝I-βwithβ≈1.5. Power laws are characteristic (but not exclusive) of systems poised close to critical points and this is supported by the analysis of the gap distribution over space in the Barro Colorado Island forest, which has been shown to be fractal. Here we propose a new model of rainforest dynamics which is able to account for a wide set of observations, strongly suggesting that indeed rainforests would be organized close to instability points, showing strongly path-dependent dynamics.

Keywords: Diversity; self-organized criticality; rainforests (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1998
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DOI: 10.1142/S0219525998000144

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