Title
Spatial organization of vegetation arising from non-local excitation with local inhibition in tropical rainforests
Date Issued
15 June 2009
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Rutgers University
Publisher(s)
Elsevier
Abstract
The Janzen-Connell (JC) effect, which hypothesizes that recruitment and growth of seedlings is positively correlated to the distance from the parent tree, is shown to generate highly organized vegetation biomass spatial patterns when coupled to a revised Fisher-Kolmogorov (FK) equation. Spatial organization arises through a novel mechanism of non-local activation and local inhibition. Over a single generation, the revised FK model calculations predict a "hen and chicks" dynamic pattern with mature trees surrounded by new seedlings growing at characteristic spatial distances in agreement with field data. Over longer timescales, the importance of stochastic dynamics, such as those associated with randomly occurring light gaps, increase thereby causing a substantial deviation between predictions from the deterministic FK model and its stochastic counterpart derived to account for such random disturbances. At still longer timescales, however, statistical measures of the spatial organization, specifically the spatial density of mature trees and their minimum spacing, converge between these two model representations. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Start page
1061
End page
1067
Volume
238
Issue
13
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Forestal
Ecología
Subjects
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-67349096296
Source
Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena
ISSN of the container
01672789
Sponsor(s)
S. Thompson acknowledges financial support from the General Sir John Monash Foundation. G. Katul acknowledges support from the US Department of Energy (DOE) through the office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) Terrestrial Carbon Processes (TCP) program (Grants 10509-0152, DE-FG02-00ER53015, and DE-FG02-95ER62083), from the National Science Foundation (NSF-EAR 0628342, NSF-EAR-0635787), and from BARD (IS3861-06). J. Terborgh acknowledges the Mellon Foundation. P. Álvarez-Loayza was funded by Rutgers University Pre-Dissertation Travel Grant, Francis J. Bossuyt Fellowship by the Organization for Tropical Studies, and a grant from the Amazon Conservation Association (ACA). Research permits to work in Manu National Park and Los Amigos Biological Station, and to export plant specimens were kindly granted by the Peruvian government Institute of Natural Resources (INRENA) and the administration of Manu National Park.
Sources of information:
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