Related papers: Predicting the species abundance distribution usin…
A simple model of biological extinction with variable system size is presented that exhibits a power-law distribution of extinction event sizes. The model is a generalization of a model recently introduced by Newman (Proc. R. Soc. Lond.…
With exponential growth in the human population, it is vital to conserve natural resources without compromising on producing enough food to feed everyone. Doing so can improve people's livelihoods, health, and ecosystems for the present and…
Ecological networks describe the interactions between different species, informing us of how they rely on one another for food, pollination and survival. If a species in an ecosystem is under threat of extinction, it can affect other…
We use a generalised version of the individual-based Tangled Nature model of evolutionary ecology to study the relationship between ecosystem structure and evolutionary history. Our evolved model ecosystems typically exhibit interaction…
Feeding a larger and wealthier global population without transgressing ecological limits is increasingly challenging, as rising food demand (especially for animal products) intensifies pressure on ecosystems, accelerates deforestation, and…
Compartmental models of epidemics are widely used to forecast the effects of communicable diseases such as COVID-19 and to guide policy. Although it has long been known that such processes take place on social networks, the assumption of…
The power spectrum, $S$, of horizontal transects of plankton abundance are often observed to have a power-law dependence on wavenumber, $k$, with exponent close to -2: $S(k)\propto k^{-2}$ over a wide range of scales. I present power…
We present a non-equilibrium statistical mechanics description of rank abundance relations (RAR) in random community models of ecology. Specifically, we study a multi-species replicator system with quenched random interaction matrices. We…
Recently several authors have proposed stochastic evolutionary models for the growth of the web graph and other networks that give rise to power-law distributions. These models are based on the notion of preferential attachment leading to…
We develop a set of equations to describe the population dynamics of many interacting species in food webs. Predator-prey interactions are non-linear, and are based on ratio-dependent functional responses. The equations account for…
The power law is useful in describing count phenomena such as network degrees and word frequencies. With a single parameter, it captures the main feature that the frequencies are linear on the log-log scale. Nevertheless, there have been…
We analyze the properties of model food webs and of fifteen community food webs from a variety of environments. We first perform a theoretical analysis of the niche model of Williams and Martinez. We derive analytical expressions for the…
We adapt existing statistical modeling techniques for social networks to study consumption data observed in trophic food webs. These data describe the feeding volume (non-negative) among organisms grouped into nodes, called trophic species,…
This paper focuses on a core task in computational sustainability and statistical ecology: species distribution modeling (SDM). In SDM, the occurrence pattern of a species on a landscape is predicted by environmental features based on…
One of the first successes of neutral ecology was to predict realistically-broad distributions of rare and abundant species. However, it has remained an outstanding theoretical challenge to describe how this distribution of abundances…
Phylogenetic diversity is a measure for describing how much of an evolutionary tree is spanned by a subset of species. If one applies this to the (unknown) subset of current species that will still be present at some future time, then this…
Modern data workflows are inherently adaptive, repeatedly querying the same dataset to refine and validate sequential decisions, but such adaptivity can lead to overfitting and invalid statistical inference. Adaptive Data Analysis (ADA)…
Citizen science databases that consist of volunteer-led sampling efforts of species communities are relied on as essential sources of data in ecology. Summarizing such data across counties with frequentist-valid prediction sets for each…
Many natural patterns, such as the distributions of blood particles in a blood sample, proteins on cell surfaces, biological populations in their habitat, galaxies in the universe, the sequence of human genes, and the fitness in…
For years, a main focus of ecological research has been to better understand the complex dynamical interactions between species which comprise food webs. Using the connectance properties of a widely explored synthetic food web called the…