Self-organized Criticality in Forest-landscape Evolution
J. C. Sprott
Department of Physics, University
of Wisconsin- Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA
Janine Bolliger and David J. Mladenoff
Department of Forest Ecology and Management, University of Wisconsin-Madison,
Madison, WI 53706 USA
(Received 5 October 2001: received in revised form 3 January 2002; accepted
3 January 2002)
ABSTRACT
A simple cellular automaton replicates the fractal pattern of a natural
forest landscape and predicts its evolution. Spatial distributions and
temporal fluctuations in global quantities show power-law spectra, implying
scale-invariance, characteristic of self-organized criticality. The evolution
toward the SOC state and the robustness of that state to perturbations
are described.
Ref: J. C. Sprott, J. Bolliger, and D. J.
Mladenoff, Phys. Lett. A 297, 267-271 (2002)
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