Issue |
EPL
Volume 100, Number 3, November 2012
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | 38002 | |
Number of page(s) | 6 | |
Section | Interdisciplinary Physics and Related Areas of Science and Technology | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/100/38002 | |
Published online | 20 November 2012 |
Absence of detailed balance in ecology
1 Dipartimento di Fisica “G. Galilei”, Università di Padova, CNISM and INFN - via Marzolo 8, 35131 Padova, Italy, EU
2 Institute of Integrative and Comparative Biology, University of Leeds - Miall Building, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK, EU
3 Department of Physics, University of Maryland - College Park, MD 20742, USA
Received: 5 July 2012
Accepted: 16 October 2012
Living systems are typically characterized by irreversible processes. A condition equivalent to the reversibility is the detailed balance, whose absence is an obstacle for analytically solving ecological models. We revisit a promising model with an elegant field-theoretic analytic solution and show that the theoretical analysis is invalid because of an implicit assumption of detailed balance. A signature of the difficulties is evident in the inconsistencies appearing in the many-point correlation functions and in the analytical formula for the species area relationship.
PACS: 87.23.Cc – Population dynamics and ecological pattern formation / 05.70.Ln – Nonequilibrium and irreversible thermodynamics / 05.40.-a – Fluctuation phenomena, random processes, noise, and Brownian motion
© EPLA, 2012
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