Multiscale Modeling of Vegetation Bands

Abstract

The questions of (1947) (“How are the individuals and the species put together? What determines their relative proportions and their spatial and temporal relations to each other?”) can be answered by examining flows and budgets of energy and matter at the scale of a specific vegetation band or their spatial relationships and aggregation. Both questions correspond to the objectives that (1984) gives to community ecology: “to detect the patterns of natural systems, to explain them by discerning the causal processes that underlie them and to generalise these explanations as far as possible.” Those patterns and processes determine the functioning of ecosystems and population dynamics that are closely linked by similar underlying spatial processes.