Related papers: Predicting Ecosystem Response to Perturbation from…

The dynamic nature of life's ability to thrive in diverse and changing planetary environments suggests that habitability and survival depend on the evolutionary path and life adaptation to environmental conditions. Here we explore such…

The observed general time-asymmetric behavior of macroscopic systems -- embodied in the second law of thermodynamics -- arises naturally from time-symmetric microscopic laws due to the great disparity between macro and micro-scales. More…

Consider a population of organisms that harvest free energy from their environment to reproduce. This paper shows that if the organisms' reproductive rates are proportional to the amount of physical free energy that they can convert into…

The concept of entropy in nonequilibrium macroscopic systems is investigated in the light of an extended equation of motion for the density matrix obtained in a previous study. It is found that a time-dependent information entropy can be…

All current formulations of nonequilibrium thermodynamics of open chemical reaction networks rely on the assumption of non-interacting species. We develop a general theory which accounts for interactions between chemical species within a…

Ecosystems are commonly conceptualized as networks of interacting species. However, partitioning natural diversity of organisms into discrete units is notoriously problematic, and mounting experimental evidence raises the intriguing…

In the past decades human activities caused global Earth system changes, e.g., climate change or biodiversity loss. Simultaneously, these associated impacts have increased environmental awareness within societies across the globe, thereby…

We assess empirical models in climate econometrics using modern statistical learning techniques. Existing approaches are prone to outliers, ignore sample dependencies, and lack principled model selection. To address these issues, we…

For macroscopic systems, the second law of thermodynamics establishes an inequality between the amount of work performed on a system in contact with a thermal reservoir, and the change in its free energy. For microscopic systems, this…

The present article introduces a reference framework for discussing resilience of computational systems. Rather than a property that may or may not be exhibited by a system, resilience is interpreted here as the emerging result of a dynamic…

In a complex community, species continuously adapt to each other. On rare occasions, the adaptation of a species can lead to the extinction of others, and even its own. "Adaptive dynamics" is the standard mathematical framework to describe…

Ecosystems display a complex spatial organization. Ecologists have long tried to characterize them by looking at how different measures of biodiversity change across spatial scales. Ecological neutral theory has provided simple predictions…

The principle of microscopic reversibility says that, in equilibrium, two-time cross-correlations are symmetric under the exchange of observables. Thus, the asymmetry of cross-correlations is a fundamental, measurable, and often-used…

Entropy serves as a central observable in equilibrium thermodynamics. However, many biological and ecological systems operate far from thermal equilibrium. Here we show that entropy production can characterize the behavior of such…

To describe the nonequilibrium states of the system, a new thermodynamic parameter - system lifetime - is introduced. Statistical distributions that describe the behavior of energy and lifetime are recorded. Entropy and obtained…

Shifting ecosystem disturbance patterns due to climate change (e.g. storms, droughts, wildfires) or direct human interference (e.g. harvests, nutrient loading) highlight the importance of quantifying and strengthening the resilience of…

In the context of global warming, tree populations rely on two primary mechanisms of adaptation: phenotypic plasticity, which enables individuals to adjust their behavior in response to environmental stress, and genetic evolution, driven by…

Life is a planetary feature that depends on its environment, but it has also strongly shaped the physical conditions on Earth, having created conditions highly suitable for a productive biosphere. Clearly, the second law of thermodynamics…

Adaptation is used by biological sensory systems to respond to a wide range of environmental signals, by adapting their response properties to the statistics of the stimulus in order to maximize information transmission. We derive rules of…

This paper proposes a new thermodynamic hypothesis that states that a nonlinear natural system that is not isolated and involves positive feedbacks tends to minimize its resistance to the flow process through it that is imposed by its…