Related papers: Towards a unified characterization of phenological…
Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…
Ecological communities with many species can be classified into dynamical phases. In systems with all-to-all interactions, a phase where a fixed point is always reached and a dynamically-fluctuating phase have been found. The dynamics when…
The influence of climate on biodiversity is an important ecological question. Various theories try to link climate change to allelic richness and therefore to predict the impact of global warming on genetic diversity. We model the…
Species interactions (ranging from direct predator prey relationships to indirect effects mediated by the environment) are central to ecosystem balance and biodiversity. While empirical methods for measuring these interactions exist, their…
This chapter is dedicated to the slow dynamics of the climate system, at time scales of one~thousand to one million years. We focus specifically on the phenomenon of ice ages that has characterised the slow evolution of climate over the…
Meteorological data have been used to calculate refractive index fluctuations - the indicator of optical instability of the Earth's atmosphere. The calculations were made for standard pressure levels of the atmosphere in winter and summer.…
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…
In this communication, the approach of phenomenological universalities of growth are considered to describe the behaviour of a system showing oscillatory growth. Two phenomenological classes are proposed to consider the behaviour of a…
We analyze several florae (collections of plant species populating specific areas) in different geographic and climatic regions. For every list of species we produce a taxonomic classification tree and we consider its statistical…
In the framework of an extended phenomenological approach to phase transitions, it is shown that existing nonlinear relation between local critical atomic parameters and phenomenological order parameter induces the corresponding nonlinear…
The existence of fluctuations of temperature has been a somewhat controversial topic in thermodynamics but nowadays it is recognized that they must be taken into account in small, finite systems. Although for nonequilibrium steady states…
Both evolution and ecology have long been concerned with the impact of variable environmental conditions on observed levels of genetic diversity within and between species. We model the evolution of a quantitative trait under selection that…
Cells generally change their internal state to adapt to an environmental change, and accordingly evolve in response to the new conditions. This process involves phenotypic changes that occur over several different time scales, ranging from…
Phenotypes of individuals in a population of organisms are not fixed. Phenotypic fluctuations, which describe temporal variation of the phenotype of an individual or individual-to-individual variation across a population, are present in…
Several different factors influence the seasonal cycle of a planet. This study uses a general circulation model and an energy balance model (EBM) to assess the parameters that govern the seasonal cycle. We define two metrics to describe the…
One of the first beings affected by changes in the climate are trees, one of our most vital resources. In this study tree species interaction and the response to climate in different ecological environments is observed by applying a joint…
There is an ongoing debate in the literature about whether the present global warming is increasing local and global temperature variability. The central methodological issues of this debate relate to the proper treatment of normalised…
Developmental trajectories are known to be canalized, or robust to both environmental and genetic perturbations. However, even when these trajectories are decanalized by an environmental perturbation outside of the range of conditions to…
We propose an evolutionary mechanism of phyllotaxis, regular arrangement of leaves on a plant stem. It is shown that the phyllotactic pattern with the Fibonacci sequence has a selective advantage, for it involves the least number of…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…