The Vasculum

ON FLATTENING THE CORNAVIRUS CURVE... NatureCITE hopes everyone is staying safe out there in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. As medical professionals have advised, wash your hands often and avoid crowds. This situation offers many lessons about biological and ecological phenomena. Here is a video about different rates of spread. Interestingly, this phenomenon is not restricted to infectious disease, but is a driving principle of physics, chemistry, biology, ecology and more---even the formation of the universe itself! Essentially, it is basic diffusion, which we tend to look at as rate of spread over relatively short periods of time. But the larger the scale at which the phenomenon is occurring, the larger the time variable. This illustrates the relativity of these interactions. Molecules in your cells diffuse (minus cytoplasmic streaming) rapidly, but species over geologic time and large landscapes spread over millennia. In the latter case, rate of spread over time...

A Treatise on Ecological Stability, Non-Weediness, and Complexity as the Rule Rather than the Exception written by Justin Thomas I believe a problem exists today in the interpretation of historical vegetation dynamics, especially as they relate to remnant grassland and woodland communities in the Midwest, east, and midsouth. The problem is that when one interprets the existence and persistence of grassland communities in this region as having resulted from historic forms of ecological “disturbance”, and then one applies one’s concept of that “disturbance,” the system often does not respond by moving closer to the perceived ideal condition (note: by “disturbance” I mean anything that induces chaos, weeds, and simplification). Instead, it becomes more chaotic, weedy, and simple, as opposed to more ordered, non-weedy, and complex. When this happens, one must either question one’s interpretation of historical conditions or one’s concept of historical processes. Clearly, at least...