Considering the ecological succession of barren dunes to an oak community usin

Considering the ecological succession of barren dunes to an oak community using a Markov Chain. In

this simple model it is assumed that there are three states for a specic ecological region. These states

are bare dunes (BD); a grass community (G); and an oak community (O). The transition probabilities are

shown in Table 1.

(1) Using this information construct the state diagram for the process

(2) Suppose initially 10% of the regions are bare dunes 10% are grass communities and the rest is oak

communities. Determine the distribution of states after 2 time steps and after 10 time steps. Interpret the

meaning of these results.

(3) Determine the limiting matrix L and the steady-state distribution for this ecological succession. Interpret

the meaning of these results.

BD G O

BD 0.3 0.2 0.1

G 0.6 0.5 0.1

O 0.1 0.3 0.8

Table 1: Transition Probabilities for Ecological Succession