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A Chip-Firing Game for Biocrust Reverse Succession

Experimental work suggests that biological soil crusts, dominant primary producers in drylands and tundra, are particularly vulnerable to disturbances that cause reverse ecological succession. To model successional transitions in biocrust communities, we propose a resource-firing game that captures succession dynamics without specifying detailed function forms. The model is evaluated in idealized terrestrial ecosystems, where disturbances are modeled as a reduction in available resources that triggers inter-species competition. The resource-firing game is executed on a finite graph with nodes representing species in the community and a sink node that becomes active when every species is depleted of resources. First, we discuss the theoretical basis of the resource-firing game, evaluate it in the light of existing literature, and consider the characteristics of a biocrust community that has evolved to equilibrium. We then examine the dependence of resource-firing and game stability on species richness, showing that high species richness increases the probability of very short and long avalanches, but not those of intermediate length. Indeed, this result suggests that the response of the community to disturbance is both directional and episodic, proceeding towards reverse succession in bursts of variable length. Finally, we incorporate the spatial structure of the biocrust community into a Cayley Tree and derive a formula for the probability that a disturbance, modeled as a random attack, initiates a large species-death event.

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