Journal
JOURNAL OF THEORETICAL BIOLOGY
Volume 259, Issue 4, Pages 701-713Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS LTD- ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2009.04.015
Keywords
Moran; Regional stochasticity; Alternate bearing; Synchronize; Nonlinear
Categories
Funding
- NSF [DMS-0703700, EF0827460]
- California Pistachio Research Board
- Californian Department of Food and Agriculture, Fertilizer Research and Education Program
- Direct For Biological Sciences [0827460] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Emerging Frontiers [0827460] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Masting is synchronous, highly variable reproduction in a plant population, or synchronized boom-bust cycles of reproduction. These pulses of resources have cascading effects through ecosystems, and thus it is important to understand where they come from. How does masting happen and synchronize? In this paper, we suggest a mechanism for this. The mechanism is inspired by data from a pistachio orchard, which suggest that large environmental noise may play a crucial role in inducing masting in plant populations such as pistachio. We test this idea through development and analysis of a mathematical model of plant reproduction. We start with a very simple model, and generalize it based on the current models of plant reproduction and masting. Our results suggest that large environmental noise may indeed be a crucial part of the mechanism of masting in certain types of plant populations, including pistachio. This is a specific example of an important functional consequence of the interactions between stochasticity and nonlinearity. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available