Related papers: Spatial effects on species persistence and implica…
We present new theoretical and empirical results on the probability distributions of species persistence times in natural ecosystems. Persistence times, defined as the timespans occurring between species' colonization and local extinction…
The distributions of species lifetimes and species in space are related, since species with good local survival chances have more time to colonize new habitats and species inhabiting large areas have higher chances to survive local…
Scaling laws in ecology, intended both as functional relationships among ecologically-relevant quantities and the probability distributions that characterize their occurrence, have long attracted the interest of empiricists and…
Over the last few decades, ecologists have come to appreciate that key ecological patterns, which describe ecological communities at relatively large spatial scales, are not only scale dependent, but also intimately intertwined. The…
Ecological systems show a variety of characteristic patterns of biodiversity in space and time. It is a challenge for theory to find models that can reproduce and explain the observed patterns. Since the advent of island biogeography these…
Understanding the causes and effects of spatial vegetation patterns is a fundamental problem in ecology, especially because these can be used as early predictors of catastrophic shifts such as desertification processes. Empirical studies of…
The spatial scale of population synchrony gives the characteristic distance at which the population fluctuations are correlated. Therefore, it gives also the characteristic size of the regions of simultaneous population depletion, or even…
Cyclic dominance between species may yield spiral waves that are known to provide a mechanism enabling persistent species coexistence. This observation holds true even in presence of spatial heterogeneity in the form of quenched disorder.…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
Eco-evolutionary frameworks can explain certain features of communities in which ecological and evolutionary processes occur over comparable timescales. Here, we investigate whether an evolutionary dynamics may interact with the spatial…
A new model ecosystem consisting of many interacting species is introduced. The species are connected through a random matrix with a given connectivity. It is shown that the system is organized close to a boundary of marginal stability in…
Models relating to the Species-Area curve are usually defined at the species level, and concerned only with ecological timescales. We examine an individual-based model of co-evolution on a spatial lattice based on the Tangled Nature model,…
Understanding how species persist under interacting stressors is a central challenge in ecology. We develop a spatially explicit reaction-diffusion framework to investigate competing species in landscapes shaped by climate variability,…
When can complex ecological interactions drive an entire ecosystem into a persistent non-equilibrium state, where species abundances keep fluctuating without going to extinction? We show that high-diversity spatially-extended systems, in…
We have generalized our ``unified'' model of evolutionary ecology by taking into account the possible movements of the organisms from one ``patch'' to another within the same eco-system. We model the spatial extension of the eco-system…
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…
Ecological systems comprise an astonishing diversity of species that cooperate or compete with each other forming complex mutual dependencies. The minimum requirements to maintain a large species diversity on long time scales are in general…
Ecological communities exhibit pervasive patterns and inter-relationships between size, abundance, and the availability of resources. We use scaling ideas to develop a unified, model-independent framework for understanding the distribution…
Climate changes may affect ecosystems destabilising relationships among species. We investigate the spatial rock-paper-scissors models with a regional unevenness that reduces the selection capacity of organisms of one species. Our results…
Ecology studies biodiversity in its variety and complexity. It describes how species distribute and perform in response to environmental changes. Ecological processes and structures are highly complex and adaptive. In order to quantify…