IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wop/safiwp/98-07-060.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Random Walks, Fractals and the Origins of Rainforest Diversity

Author

Listed:
  • Ricard V. Sole
  • David Alonso

Abstract

Rainforests are legendary because of their extreme species richness. In the richest rain forests every second tree on a hectare is a different species. As a consequence, most species are rare. Using field data from studies in different parts of the world, we show that species-rich plots often display a distribution of number of species N_s(I) represented by I individuals with a power-law shape with 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. To appear in: J. Complex Systems.

Suggested Citation

  • Ricard V. Sole & David Alonso, 1998. "Random Walks, Fractals and the Origins of Rainforest Diversity," Working Papers 98-07-060, Santa Fe Institute.
  • Handle: RePEc:wop:safiwp:98-07-060
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Random walks; fractals; rainforest diversity;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wop:safiwp:98-07-060. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Thomas Krichel (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/epstfus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.