The potential and flux landscape theory of ecology.

ABSTRACT: The species in ecosystems are mutually interacting and self sustainable stable for a certain period. Stability and dynamics are crucial for understanding the structure and the function of ecosystems. We developed a potential and flux landscape theory of ecosystems to address these issues. We show that the driving force of the ecological dynamics can be decomposed to the gradient of the potential landscape and the curl probability flux measuring the degree of the breaking down of the detailed balance (due to in or out flow of the energy to the ecosystems). We found that the underlying intrinsic potential landscape is a global Lyapunov function monotonically going down in time and the topology of the landscape provides a quantitative measure for the global stability of the ecosystems. We als

SUBMITTER: Xu L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3907570 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature