Hooray for fractals!
This article makes me want to dig out those old printouts of the mandelbrot set I made on my TI-85 I’ve got laying around somewhere:
The researchers have found, for instance, that in a mature forest, the average distance between trees of the same mass follows a quarter-power scaling law, as does trunk diameter. These two scaling laws are proportional to each other, so that on average, the distance between trees of the same mass is simply proportional to the diameter of their trunks.
“When you walk in a forest, it looks random, but it’s actually quite regular on average,” West says. “People have been measuring size and density of trees for 100 years, but no one had noticed these simple relationships.”
The researchers have also discovered that the number of trees of a given mass in a forest follows the same scaling law governing the number of branches of a given size on an individual tree. “The forest as a whole behaves as if it is a very large tree,” West says.