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An Investigation Of Percolation In Ecological Systems

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dc.contributor.advisor Guttal, Vishwesha en_US
dc.contributor.author HALDER, KOUSTAV en_US
dc.date.accessioned 2021-08-17T10:46:59Z
dc.date.available 2021-08-17T10:46:59Z
dc.date.issued 2021-06
dc.identifier.citation 62 en_US
dc.identifier.uri http://dr.iiserpune.ac.in:8080/xmlui/handle/123456789/6149
dc.description.abstract Vegetation cover in certain ecological habitats display the naturally occurring presence of non-uniform “patchy” clusters of dense vegetation; with the steady-state distribution of these cluster sizes exhibiting a “power-law” distribution. Thought to be a product of underlying facilitative interactions between individual plants, these features have piqued extensive interest among ecologists as a way to gauge the resilience of the overarching vegetation system. Even so, most ecological studies delving into spatial pattern formation have focused on ‘static’ averaged properties of the clusters, rather than their dynamic behaviour & variations. Concurrently, the mathematical properties of a common computational framework used to study pattern-formation — the Stochastic Cellular Automata (SCA) — remain ill-characterised for relevant models that incorporate facilitative interactions. In contrast, the rapid expansion of readily accessible remote sensing data has opened up fertile ground in understanding the dynamic behaviour of vegetation clusters in real-world ecosystems. Thus, building on previous work, we test a dynamical metric which indicates that the distribution in cluster size change at equilibrium shows a fattened tail near the geometric critical threshold at ecologically relevant time-scales, and may conceivably serve as a field tool to assess the closeness of ecosystems to such thresholds. We also show that a range of SCA with facilitative feedback— including the model used in the above metric —display finite-sized scaling at their geometric threshold. We expect our presented work will add to the growing understanding and assessment of resilience in ecosystems, as well as foment further theoretical insights into the mathematical nature of SCA. en_US
dc.description.sponsorship The INSPIRE SHE scholarship, offered by the Ministry of Human Resources (MHRD), Government Of India. Otherwise, this thesis was proudly free of any corporate sponsors. en_US
dc.language.iso en en_US
dc.subject Spatial Ecology en_US
dc.subject Landscape Ecology en_US
dc.subject Percolation Models en_US
dc.subject Theoretical Ecology en_US
dc.subject Computational Ecology en_US
dc.subject Power Law Clustering en_US
dc.subject Local Positive Feedback en_US
dc.title An Investigation Of Percolation In Ecological Systems en_US
dc.type Thesis en_US
dc.type Dissertation en_US
dc.type.degree BS-MS en_US
dc.contributor.department Dept. of Biology en_US
dc.contributor.registration 20161039 en_US


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  • MS THESES [1705]
    Thesis submitted to IISER Pune in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the BS-MS Dual Degree Programme/MSc. Programme/MS-Exit Programme

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