Statics and dynamics of ecosystems

Understanding an ecological community represents a formidable many-body problem - one has an interacting many-body system with imperfectly known interactions and a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. In tropical forests across the globe, ecologists have been able to measure certain quantities such as the distribution of relative species abundance; the probability that two trees drawn randomly a specified distance apart belong to the same species; and the dynamics of species turnover. A simple analytic framework will be presented for describing the statics and dynamics of ecosystems and its predictions will be benchmarked against observational data. \newline \newline I. Volkov et al., Nature 424, 1035-1037 (2003); Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 218703 (2004); Nature 438, 658-661 (2005). \newline T. Zillio et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 098101 (2005). \newline S. Azaele et al., Nature (2006) in press.