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Community ecology neutral models and the topology of connectivity
Citation:
WHITE, D. Community ecology neutral models and the topology of connectivity. Presented at OSU IGERT eco-informatics group, Corvallis, OR, February 22, 2011.
Impact/Purpose:
This presentation will tie together two threads of past research. The first thread is research on biodiversity starting in the 1990s with the Biodiversity Research consortium initiated by EPA and the US Forest Service, and including the US Fish and Wildlife Service Gap Analysis Program, the US Geological Service EROS Data Center, and The Nature Conservancy. A major theoretical effort in biodiversity research was the publication f Stephen Hubbell’s The Unified Neutral theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography in 2001. From this theory and, in particular, its implementation in a simulation model by Graham Bell, I developed a computer model of neutral theory.
Description:
This presentation will tie together two threads of past research. The first thread is research on biodiversity starting in the 1990s with the Biodiversity Research consortium initiated by EPA and the US Forest Service, and including the US Fish and Wildlife Service Gap Analysis Program, the US Geological Service EROS Data Center, and The Nature Conservancy. A major theoretical effort in biodiversity research was the publication f Stephen Hubbell’s The Unified Neutral theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography in 2001. From this theory and, in particular, its implementation in a simulation model by Graham Bell, I developed a computer model of neutral theory. The second thread started in my days at the Harvard Graduate School of Design Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis. During my years there I attended meetings of an informal group of Cambridge scholars called the Philomorphs. This group included Stephan Jay Gould, Cyril Smith, Arthur Loeb, Michael Woldenberg, and others. Near the end of my time at Harvard in a meeting of the Philoorphs, Tommaso Toffoli of MIT made a presentation of his hardward implementation of a cellular automata machine. I was stimulated by his presentation to buy his book co-authored with Normal Margolus. In this book I found the interesting finding that a two-dimensional implementation of the Navier-Stokes equation for fluid motion produced artifacts when implemented on a square grid but did produce such artifacts when implemented on a hexagon grid. The presentation will then (1)show results comparing neutral model performance on two types of square grid landscapes versus a hexagonal landscape, (2) motivate then show results comparing neutral model performance on two extreme linear network topologies representing abstract stream networks, and (3) show other issues with square grid representations compared with hexagon grids.