Publications by Amos Maritan | EPFL Graph Search

Related publications (27)

On the probabilistic nature of the species-area relation

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan, Andrea Giometto, Jonathan Giezendanner, Silvia Zaoli

The Species-Area Relation (SAR), which describes the increase in the number of species S with increasing area A, is under intense scrutiny in contemporary ecology, in particular to probe its reliability in predicting the number of species going extinct as ...

2019

A general basis for quarter-power scaling in animals

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan

It has been known for decades that the metabolic rate of animals scales with body mass with an exponent that is almost always 2/3, and often very close to 3/4. The 3/4 exponent emerges naturally from two models of resource distribution networks, radia ...

National Academy of Sciences2010

Spatial effects on species persistence and implications for biodiversity

Andrea Rinaldo, Enrico Bertuzzo, Amos Maritan, Lorenzo Mari, Samir Suweis

Natural ecosystems are characterized by striking diversity of form and functions and yet exhibit deep symmetries emerging across scales of space, time, and organizational complexity. Species-area relationships and species-abundance distributions are exampl ...

2011

Covariations in ecological scaling laws fostered by community dynamics

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan, Andrea Giometto, Silvia Zaoli

Scaling laws in ecology, intended both as functional relationships among ecologically relevant quantities and the probability distributions that characterize their occurrence, have long attracted the interest of empiricists and theoreticians. Empirical evi ...

2017

From the Cover: Water-controlled wealth of nations

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan, Samir Suweis

Population growth is in general constrained by food production, which in turn depends on the access to water resources. At a country level, some populations use more water than they control because of their ability to import food and the virtual water requ ...

National Academy of Sciences2013

Generalized receptor law governs phototaxis in the phytoplankton Euglena gracilis

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan, Andrea Giometto, Florian Altermatt

Phototaxis, the process through which motile organisms direct their swimming toward or away from light, is implicated in key ecological phenomena (including algal blooms and diel vertical migration) that shape the distribution, diversity, and productivity ...

National Academy of Sciences2015

Sample and population exponents of generalized Taylor's law

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan, Andrea Giometto

Taylor's law (TL) states that the variance V of a nonnegative random variable is a power function of its mean M; i.e., V = aM(b). TL has been verified extensively in ecology, where it applies to population abundance, physics, and other natural sciences. It ...

National Academy of Sciences2015

True scale-free networks hidden by finite size effects

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan, Samir Suweis

We analyze about 200 naturally occurring networks with distinct dynamical origins to formally test whether the commonly assumed hypothesis of an underlying scale-free structure is generally viable. This has recently been questioned on the basis of statisti ...

National Academy of Sciences2021

On species persistence-time distributions

Andrea Rinaldo, Enrico Bertuzzo, Amos Maritan, Lorenzo Mari, Samir Suweis

We present new theoretical and empirical results on the probability distributions of species persistence times in natural ecosystems. Persistence times, defined as the timespans occurring between species' colonization and local extinction in a given geogra ...

Elsevier2012

Universal scaling of optimal current distributions in transportation networks

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan

Transportation networks are inevitably selected with reference to their global cost which depends on the strengths and the distribution of the embedded currents. We prove that optimal current distributions for a uniformly injected d-dimensional network exh ...

2009

Coarse-grained entropy production with multiple reservoirs: Unraveling the role of time scales and detailed balance in biology-inspired systems

Amos Maritan, Daniel Maria Busiello

A general framework to describe a vast majority of biology-inspired systems is to model them as stochastic processes in which multiple couplings are in play at the same time. Molecular motors, chemical reaction networks, catalytic enzymes, and particles ex ...

2020

Evolution and selection of river networks: Statics, dynamics, and complexity

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan

Moving from the exact result that drainage network configurations minimizing total energy dissipation are stationary solutions of the general equation describing landscape evolution, we review the static properties and the dynamic origins of the scale-inva ...

National Academy of Sciences2014

Generalized size scaling of metabolic rates based on single-cell measurements with freshwater phytoplankton

Anders Meibom, Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan, Stéphane Laurent Escrig, Andrea Giometto, Silvia Zaoli

Kleiber's law describes the scaling of metabolic rate with body size across several orders of magnitude in size and across taxa and is widely regarded as a fundamental law in biology. The physiological origins of Kleiber's law are still debated and general ...

National Academy of Sciences2019

Form, function, and evolution of living organisms

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan

Despite the vast diversity of sizes and shapes of living organisms, life's organization across scales exhibits remarkable commonalities, most notably through the approximate validity of Kleiber's law, the power law scaling of metabolic rates with the mass ...

National Academy of Sciences2014

Prescription-induced jump distributions in multiplicative Poisson processes

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan, Samir Suweis

Generalized Langevin equations (GLE) with multiplicative white Poisson noise pose the usual prescription dilemma leading to different evolution equations (master equations) for the probability distribution. Contrary to the case of multiplicative gaussian w ...

2011

Stochastic modeling of soil salinity

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan, Samir Suweis

A minimalist stochastic model of primary soil salinity is proposed, in which the rate of soil salinization is determined by the balance between dry and wet salt deposition and the intermittent leaching events caused by rainfall events. The long term probab ...

American Geophysical Union2010

Entropy production for coarse-grained dynamics

Daniel Maria Busiello, Amos Maritan

Systems out of equilibrium exhibit a net production of entropy. We study the dynamics of a stochastic system represented by a Master equation (ME) that can be modeled by a Fokker-Planck equation in a coarse-grained, mesoscopic description. We show that the ...

2019

Spanning traceroutes over modular networks and general scaling degree distributions

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan

We analyze the class of networks characterized by modular structure where a sequence of l Erdos-Renyi random networks of size N >> 1 with random average degrees is joined by links whose structure must remain immaterial. We find that traceroutes spanning th ...

American Physical Society2010

Entropy production in systems with unidirectional transitions

Amos Maritan, Daniel Maria Busiello

The entropy production is one of the most essential features for systems operating out of equilibrium. The formulation for discrete-state systems goes back to the celebrated Schnakenberg's work and hitherto can be carried out when for each transition betwe ...

2020

Scaling body size fluctuations

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan, Andrea Giometto, Francesco Carrara, Florian Altermatt

The size of an organism matters for its metabolic, growth, mortality, and other vital rates. Scale-free community size spectra (i.e., size distributions regardless of species) are routinely observed in natural ecosystems and are the product of intra- and i ...

National Academy of Sciences2013