Absence of Detailed Balance in Ecology

Abstract

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.

8 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for publication in EPL

References in corpus (4)

• Neutral Theory and Relative Species Abundance in Ecology
• Probability currents as principal characteristics in the statistical mechanics of non-equilibrium steady states
• Spatial Scaling in Model Plant Communities
• Spatial aggregation and the species-area relationship across scales

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Stochastic spatial models in ecology: a statistical physics approach