Consequences of fundamental physical and dimensional constraints on ecosystems

Details Consequences of fundamental physical and dimensional constraints on ecosystems Consequences of fundamental physical and dimensional constraints on ecosystems

2011-08-24

arxiv.org/abs/1108.4802v1

Physics

Biological Physics

8 pages, 2 figures

Scientific paper

We perform the first bottom up analysis of an idealized ecosystem using Buckingham's Pi theorem. Our analysis requires only three assumptions, (i) that the ecosystem is in a dynamically balanced steady state, (ii) that some (non- unique) method exists that can differentiate different functional groups of individuals within the ecosystem and (iii) that these functional groups are connected to each other by the flow of resource. The expression that we obtain relates the level of complexity that the ecosystem can support to intrinsic macroscopic variables such as density, diversity and characteristic length scales for foraging or dispersal, and extrinsic macroscopic variables such as habitat size and the rate of supply of resource. This expression relates these macroscopic variables to each other, generating commonly observed macroecological patterns. Since we do not require any details of the ecosystem function to obtain these broad macroecological patterns this may explain why they are ubiquitous. Departures from our relationship may indicate that the ecosystem is in a state of rapid change, i.e., abundance or diversity explosion or collapse. Our result provides normalised variables that can be used to isolate the trend in one ecosystem variable from another, providing a new method for isolating macroecological patterns in data. Quite generally, a dimensionless control parameter for ecosystem complexity emerges from our dimensional analysis. This, we suggest, will be a control parameter in dynamical models for ecosystems based on energy flow and conservation and will order the emergent behaviour of these models.

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