Emergence of vertical diversity under disturbance

by Prof. Hiroki Ohta (Obihiro University of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, Japan.)

Monday 31 Aug 2026, 14:30 → 15:30 Asia/Kolkata

A304 and On Zoom

We propose a statistical physics model of a neutral community, where each agent can represent identical plant species growing in the vertical direction with sunlight in the form of rich-get-richer competition. Disturbance added to this ecosystem, which makes an agent restart from the lowest growth level, is realized as a stochastic resetting. We show that in this model for sufficiently strong competition, vertical diversity characterized by a family of Hill numbers robustly emerges as a local maximum at intermediate disturbance.