Related papers: The link between segregation and phylogenetic dive…
If predictions for species extinctions hold, then the `tree of life' today may be quite different to that in (say) 100 years. We describe a technique to quantify how much each species is likely to contribute to future biodiversity, as…
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…
The evolutionary edit distance between two individuals in a population, i.e., the amount of applications of any genetic operator it would take the evolutionary process to generate one individual starting from the other, seems like a…
Ecological studies have now gone beyond measures of species turnover towards measures of phylogenetic and functional dissimilarity with a main objective: disentangling the processes that drive species distributions from local to broad…
A two-parameter family of exchangeable partitions with a simple updating rule is introduced. The partition is identified with a randomized version of a standard symmetric Dirichlet species-sampling model with finitely many types. A…
Phylogenies are commonly used to represent the evolutionary relationships between species, and often these phylogenies are equipped with edge lengths that indicate degrees of evolutionary difference. Given such a phylogeny, a popular…
Phylogenetic diversity is a popular measure for quantifying the biodiversity of a collection $Y$ of species, while phylogenetic diversity indices provide a way to apportion phylogenetic diversity to individual species. Typically, for some…
In biodiversity conservation it is often necessary to prioritize the species to conserve. Existing approaches to prioritization, e.g. the Fair Proportion Index and the Shapley Value, are based on phylogenetic trees and rank species…
Phylogenetic diversity indices are commonly used to rank the elements in a collection of species or populations for conservation purposes. The derivation of these indices is typically based on some quantitative description of the…
Measures of biodiversity change such as the Living Planet Index describe proportional change in the abundance of a typical species, which can be thought of as change in the size of a community. Here, I discuss the orthogonal concept of…
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…
It is generally accepted that "diversity" is associated with success in evolutionary algorithms. However, diversity is a broad concept that can be measured and defined in a multitude of ways. To date, most evolutionary computation research…
Phylogenetic Diversity (PD) is a prominent quantitative measure of the biodiversity of a collection of present-day species (taxa). This measure is based on the evolutionary distance among the species in the collection. Loosely speaking, if…
Recent methodological advances are enabling better examination of speciation and extinction processes and patterns. A major open question is the origin of large discrepancies in species number between groups of the same age. Existing…
Phylogenetics uses alignments of molecular sequence data to learn about evolutionary trees relating species. Along branches, sequence evolution is modelled using a continuous-time Markov process characterised by an instantaneous rate…
Molecular phenotypes are important links between genomic information and organismic functions, fitness, and evolution. Complex phenotypes, which are also called quantitative traits, often depend on multiple genomic loci. Their evolution…
How does the interplay between selection, mutation and horizontal gene transfer modify the phenotypic distribution of a bacterial or cell population? While horizontal gene transfer, which corresponds to the exchange of genetic material…
Species growing in environments that change in time and space will vary in their abundance across locations, even in the absence of persistent location preferences. Here we quantify this non-equilibrium effect by studying a minimal model of…
We present a novel mathematical model of heterogeneous cell proliferation where the total population consists of a subpopulation of slow-proliferating cells and a subpopulation of fast-proliferating cells. The model incorporates two…
Phylogenetic trees are simple models of evolutionary processes. They describe conditionally independent divergent evolution of taxa from common ancestors. Phylogenetic trees commonly do not have enough flexibility to adequately model all…