Emergence of vertical diversity under disturbance

Abstract

We propose a statistical physics model of a neutral community, where each agent can represent identical plant species growing in the vertical direction with sunlight in the form of rich-get-richer competition. Disturbance added to this ecosystem, which makes an agent restart from the lowest growth level, is realized as a stochastic resetting. We show that in this model for sufficiently strong competition, vertical diversity characterized by a family of Hill numbers robustly emerges as a local maximum at intermediate disturbance.

12 pages, 9 figures

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