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Updated: Oct 16, 2025

Experimental Protocol for Manipulating Plant-induced Soil Heterogeneity
Published on: March 13, 2014
Emergent spatial patterns of coexistence in species-rich plant communities
Pablo Villegas1, Tommaso Gili1, Guido Caldarelli2,3,4,5
1IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, 55100 Lucca, Italy.
Abstract:
Statistical physics has proved essential to analyze multiagent environments. Motivated by the empirical observation of various nonequilibrium features in Barro Colorado and other ecological systems, we analyze a plant-species abundance model of neutral competition, presenting analytical evidence of scale-invariant plant clusters and nontrivial emergent modular correlations. Such first theoretical confirmation of a scale-invariant region, based on percolation processes, reproduces the key features in natural rainforest ecosystems and can confer the most stable equilibrium for ecosystems with vast biodiversity.
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