Exploring Evolving Plants as Interacting Particles in a Randomly Generated Heterogeneous Environment

TL;DR

This paper presents a stochastic model of plant evolution in a heterogeneous environment, capturing how environmental factors influence plant survival, reproduction, and genetic adaptation over time.

Contribution

It introduces a novel probabilistic framework for simulating plant evolution considering environmental heterogeneity and genetic mutations.

Findings

Plants adapt their attributes based on environmental fitness.

Evolutionary convergence occurs under certain environmental conditions.

Environmental heterogeneity significantly influences plant diversity and adaptation.

Abstract

We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other attributes that directly affect plant growth and reproduction. Each plant has preferences for environment attributes. Depending on how suitable the environment is to the plants, seeds are released or death occurs. With every reproductive cycle, genetic mutations occur. To model competition, plants in compete for survival, and success is stochastically dependent on environmental fitness. Our model determines whether and how evolution occurs, and how the attributes of plants change and possibly converge over time in relation to the attributes of the environment.