Ecological systems in a modeling perspective

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Lindström, Torsten
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Lindström, Torsten
author_facet Lindström, Torsten
contents May (1974,1976) opened the debate on whether biological populations might exhibit nonlinear dynamics and chaos. However, it has in general been difficult to verify nonlinear dynamics in biological populations. There are many reports concerning problems with this issue and some of them can be traced back to Hassell, Lawton, and May (1976) and Morris (1990). Our objective is not a discussion of the presence of nonlinear dynamics in biological populations. Instead, we analyze whether ecological census data can be used for validating nonlinearities at all. We choose our models and our situation so that as much as possible can be done rigorously with by hand computations. We consider a clearly nonlinear chemostat based model that is isolated. Some noise must be considered, and we choose a minimal approach: Only noise originating from the fact that ecological populations remain finite is considered, cf. Bailey (1964). In ecology, exceptionally long and famous time series are those collected by Nicholson (1954) and Utida (1957). Our judgement is that ecological time series data containing a few hundred data points is exceptionally long.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_26860
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Ecological systems in a modeling perspective
Lindström, Torsten
Other Quantitative Biology
May (1974,1976) opened the debate on whether biological populations might exhibit nonlinear dynamics and chaos. However, it has in general been difficult to verify nonlinear dynamics in biological populations. There are many reports concerning problems with this issue and some of them can be traced back to Hassell, Lawton, and May (1976) and Morris (1990). Our objective is not a discussion of the presence of nonlinear dynamics in biological populations. Instead, we analyze whether ecological census data can be used for validating nonlinearities at all. We choose our models and our situation so that as much as possible can be done rigorously with by hand computations. We consider a clearly nonlinear chemostat based model that is isolated. Some noise must be considered, and we choose a minimal approach: Only noise originating from the fact that ecological populations remain finite is considered, cf. Bailey (1964). In ecology, exceptionally long and famous time series are those collected by Nicholson (1954) and Utida (1957). Our judgement is that ecological time series data containing a few hundred data points is exceptionally long.
title Ecological systems in a modeling perspective
topic Other Quantitative Biology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26860