Peri­odic floods are a nor­mal occur­rence in wet­lands. To find out how these floods impact niches of dif­fer­ent plant species in wet­lands, Prince­ton researchers stud­ied plant species in Ever­glades National Park (ENP) in Florida. They found that the sizes of the clus­ters of each species fol­low a power law prob­a­bil­ity dis­tri­b­u­tion and that such clus­ters have well-defined frac­tal char­ac­ter­is­tics. They mod­eled the effect that peri­odic flood­ing and neigh­bor­ing veg­e­ta­tion have on plant clus­ters. They found that cli­mate and land man­age­ment have a pre­dictable impact on the type of veg­e­ta­tion and its spa­tial orga­ni­za­tion in wetlands. The find­ings are highly rel­e­vant for the man­age­ment of wet­land ecosystems.

R Foti, M Del Jesus, A Rinaldo, and I Rodriguez-Iturbe. Hydrope­riod regime con­trols the orga­ni­za­tion of plant species in wet­lands.
PNAS, Novem­ber 13, 2012

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