Robert Schlicht | PubMed Health

PubMed2006

Direction of regeneration waves in grid-based models for forest dynamics.

Progressing waves of regeneration are observed in forest ecosystems such as Shimagare fir forests. The patterns generated by lattice models for forest dynamics often show similar waves of disturbance and recovery. This paper introduces a method to detect and quantify the directional movement of these waves. The method is based only on the disturbance times of the sites and allows to distinguish three types of wave patterns: patterns with global direction, patterns with local direction, and patterns without direction. We apply this to several grid-based models for forest dynamics which are evaluated analytically or by simulation. The results reveal a clear distinction of the models which earlier studies were not able to detect.

Ecosystem↗

PubMed2004

Forest gap dynamics and the Ising model.

The vegetation height in forest ecosystems is spatially heterogeneous. Canopy gaps (sites with low vegetation) are formed by treefalls, and they recover to canopy sites (with high vegetation) either by growth of small trees or by branch extension of surrounding trees. The dynamics of canopy gaps have been studied using a spatial Markov chain with nearest neighbor interaction. (1) If the canopy recovery rate is constant and if the gap formation rate for a site increases exponentially with the number of neighboring gap sites, the equilibrium distribution is the same as the one generated by the Ising model in statistical mechanics. Here, we extend the equivalence to the situation in which both the gap formation and canopy recovery depend on the neighborhood, as shown in recent forest data. (2) We develop a statistical test of whether a given spatial pattern is a random sample from the Ising model. The test is based on the conditional probability of configurations on a partial lattice. We apply the method to vegetation height data from the Ogawa forest reserve, Japan, measured on a 5x5 m grid in 1976, 1981, 1986, and 1991. The spatial pattern of the original forest data deviates significantly from the Ising model. We examine whether a larger sampling distance or the removal of the effects of the topography can reduce this deviation.

Ecosystem↗