Related papers: Threshold Extinction in Food Webs
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…
Mass extinction is a phenomenon in the history of life on Earth when a considerable number of species go extinct over a relatively short period of time. The magnitude of extinction varies between the events, the most well known are the…
Body size or mass is one of the main factors underlying food webs structure. A large number of evolutionary models have shown that indeed, the adaptive evolution of body size (or mass) can give rise to hierarchically organised trophic…
The decline in ecological connections signifies the potential extinction of species, which can be attributed to disruptions and alterations. The decrease in interconnections among species reflects their susceptibility to changes. For…
Habitat loss, driven primarily by anthropogenic activity, significantly threatens ecosystem sustainability. While it is well understood that habitat loss is the leading contributor to declines in biodiversity worldwide, the connection…
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…
We present numerical results based on a simplified ecological system in evolution, showing features of extinction similar to that claimed for the biosystem on Earth. In the model each species consists of a population in interaction with 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…
The World Trade Web (WTW) is a weighted network whose nodes correspond to countries with edge weights reflecting the value of imports and/or exports between countries. In this paper we introduce to this macroeconomic system the notion of…
While the global-average temperatures are rapidly rising, more researchers have been shifting their focus towards the past mass-extinction events in order to show the relations between temperature increase and temperature thresholds which…
The extinction of species is a core process that affects the diversity of life on Earth. One way of investigating the causes and consequences of extinctions is to build conceptual ecological models, and to use the dynamical outcomes of such…
Humans are increasingly stressing ecosystems via habitat destruction, climate change and global population movements leading to the widespread loss of biodiversity and the disruption of key ecological services. Ecosystems characterized…
The robustness of an ecological network quantifies the resilience of the ecosystem it represents to species loss. It corresponds to the proportion of species that are disconnected from the rest of the network when extinctions occur…
Despite tremendous interest in the topic and decades of research, the origins of the major losses of biodiversity in the history of life on Earth remain elusive. A variety of possible causes for these mass-extinction events have been…
A classic measure of ecological stability describes the tendency of a community to return to equilibrium after small perturbation. While many advances show how the network structure of these communities severely constrains such tendencies,…
Changing environmental conditions can significantly affect the dynamics of disease spread. These changes may arise naturally or result from human interventions; in the latter case, lockdown measures that lead to abrupt but temporary…
Ecological networks such as plant-pollinator systems and food webs vary in space and time. This variability includes fluctuations in global network properties such as total number and intensity of interactions but also in the local…
Methods for predicting the probability and timing of a species' extinction are typically based on a combination of theoretical models and empirical data, and focus on single species population dynamics. Of course, species also interact with…
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,…
Food webs represent the set of consumer-resource interactions among a set of species that co-occur in a habitat, but most food web studies have omitted parasites and their interactions. Recent studies have provided conflicting evidence on…