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Spatiotemporal complexity of plankton and fish dynamics. (English) Zbl 1001.92050

Summary: Nonlinear dynamics and chaotic and complex systems constitute some of the most fascinating developments of late twentieth century mathematics and physics. The implications have changed our understanding of important phenomena in almost every field of science, including biology and ecology. This article investigates complexity and chaos in the spatiotemporal dynamics of aquatic ecosystems. The dynamics of these biological communities exhibit an interplay between processes acting on a scale from hundreds of meters to kilometers, controlled by biology, and processes acting on a scale from dozens to hundreds of kilometers, dominated by the heterogeneity of hydrophysical fields. We focus on how biological processes affect spatiotemporal pattern formation. Our results show that modeling by reaction-diffusion equations is an appropriate tool for investigating fundamental mechanisms of complex spatiotemporal plankton dynamics, fractal properties of planktivorous fish school movements, and their interrelationships.

MSC:

92D40 Ecology
37N25 Dynamical systems in biology
82C41 Dynamics of random walks, random surfaces, lattice animals, etc. in time-dependent statistical mechanics
35K57 Reaction-diffusion equations

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