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Comment by Vexs | Hacker News Reader

You can see a pretty concrete example of this in forests, the trees are all densely packed, and random- and thus fall under hyperuniform. (as far as I can tell, anyway. Haven't exactly tested it, but it sure looks hyperuniform.) I've noticed it in a handful of other things, but I never knew there was an actual thing behind it.

Absolutely fascinating, and it's applications in materials are amazing. Whatever-direction bandpass filters? Crazy cool.

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Depending on where you live, most trees are planted by humans in very regular intervals.

Old growth forest that did not get planted by humans have a much more chaotic distribution that's influences by fires, fallen trees, local fauna, and competition for sunshine with other trees.

Interesting. I have never quite thought about the example of trees but it's possible something like that is going on. If someone would know, it would be Geoffrey West from the Santa Fe Institute and indeed he delivers: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/17/7040.full

According to their theory: "(...) the average distance between the trunks of individuals (trees) of the same size scales linearly with radius (of the tree)"

I remember seeing a documentary were some scientist's work on forest/tree distribution was shown.

In the forest they measured, the fractal shape of the tree actually extended to the forest itself, as if the forest itself is one big "tree" with actual trees as its branches.

(Though, trees are 3D fractals, forest is a 2D plane, how does that work?..)

It probably has to do with seed dropping patterns, and where light is. Fascinating stuff though.

I'd imagine most trees would grow in hyperuniform distributions, since light is blocked by large trees, but seeds tend to fall very close.

Some trees also secrete chemicals that block their offspring from growing over their roots, which can combine with light availability to further the minimum distance between large trees.

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