Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Systems Biology
From Energy Gradient And Natural Selection To Biodiversity And Stability Of Ecosystems, Bo Deng
From Energy Gradient And Natural Selection To Biodiversity And Stability Of Ecosystems, Bo Deng
Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications
The purpose of this paper is to incorporate well-established ecological principles into a foodweb model consisting of four trophic levels --- abiotic resources, plants, herbivores, and carnivores. The underlining principles include Kimura's neutral theory of genetic evolution, Liebig's Law of the Minimum for plant growth, Holling's functionals for herbivore foraging and carnivore predation, the One-Life Rule for all organisms, and Lotka-Volterra's model for intraand interspecific competitions. Numerical simulations of the model led to the following statistical findings: (a) particular foodwebs can give contradicting observations on biodiversity and productivity, in particular, all known functional forms -- - positive, negative, sigmoidal, and …
The Time Invariance Principle, Ecological (Non)Chaos, And A Fundamental Pitfall Of Discrete Modeling, Bo Deng
The Time Invariance Principle, Ecological (Non)Chaos, And A Fundamental Pitfall Of Discrete Modeling, Bo Deng
Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications
This paper is to show that most discrete models used for population dynamics in ecology are inherently pathological that their predications cannot be independently verified by experiments because they violate a fundamental principle of physics. The result is used to tackle an on-going controversy regarding ecological chaos. Another implication of the result is that all continuous dynamical systems must be modeled by differential equations. As a result it suggests that researches based on discrete modeling must be closely scrutinized and the teaching of calculus and differential equations must be emphasized for students of biology.