When are bacteria really gazelles? Comparing patchy ecologies with dimensionless numbers.

ABSTRACT: From micro to planetary scales, spatial heterogeneity-patchiness-is ubiquitous in ecosystems, defining the environments in which organisms move and interact. However, most large-scale models still use spatially averaged 'mean fields' to represent natural populations, while fine-scale spatially explicit models are mostly restricted to particular organisms or systems. In a conceptual paper, Grünbaum (2012, Interface Focus 2: 150-155) introduced a heuristic, based on three dimensionless ratios quantifying movement, reproduction and resource consumption, to characterise patchy ecological interactions and identify when mean-field assumptions are justifiable. We calculated these dimensionless numbers for 33 interactions between consumers and their resource patches in terrestrial, aquatic and aer

SUBMITTER: Urmy SS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9545138 | biostudies-literature | 2022 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature