The resilience of an ecosystem to environmental and human-induced change may depend on how the system’s plants are arranged. Do they form patchy clumps or networks extending over the whole terrain? A team of researchers in Italy, led by Pablo Villegas, has now shown that, in a tropical rainforest in Panama, the dominant plant species are arranged in so-called scale-free distributions containing clusters with a wide range of sizes. This distribution is characteristic of a system close to a critical state, in which the effects of perturbations can be rapidly felt throughout the system. The observations could help to guide strategies for protecting rainforests and other ecosystems from collapse in the face of environmental change.
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Evidence of scale-free clusters of vegetation in tropical rainforests