title: Emergent long-range synchronization of oscillating ecological populations without external forcing described by Ising universality.
abstract: Understanding the synchronization of oscillations across space is fundamentally important to many scientific disciplines. In ecology, long-range synchronization of oscillations in spatial populations may elevate extinction risk and signal an impending catastrophe. The prevailing assumption is that synchronization on distances longer than the dispersal scale can only be due to environmental correlation (the Moran effect). In contrast, we show how long-range synchronization can emerge over distances much longer than the length scales of either dispersal or environmental correlation. In particular, we demonstrate that the transition from incoherence to long-range synchronization of two-cycle oscillations in noisy spatial population models is described by the Ising universality class of statistical physics. This result shows, in contrast to all previous work, how the Ising critical transition can emerge directly from the dynamics of ecological populations.
authors: Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Davis, California 95616, USA.|Department of Physics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, USA.
authors: Andrew E
authors: AE
authors: Noble
authors: Department of Physics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, USA.|Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501, USA.
authors: Jonathan
authors: J
authors: Machta
authors: Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Davis, California 95616, USA.
authors: Alan
authors: A
authors: Hastings
mesh_terms: D003710:Demography; D004463:Ecology; D016015:Logistic Models; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011157:Population Dynamics