Related papers: Investigating the relationship between biodiversit…
The evaluation of the number of ways we can distribute energy among a collection of particles in a system is important in many branches of modern science. In particular, in multiparticle production processes the measurements of particle…
Understanding the behaviors of ecological systems is challenging given their multi-faceted complexity. To proceed, theoretical models such as Lotka-Volterra dynamics with random interactions have been investigated by the dynamical…
In this paper entropy based methods are compared and used to measure structural diversity of an ensemble of 21 classifiers. This measure is mostly applied in ecology, whereby species counts are used as a measure of diversity. The measures…
Microbial ecosystems exhibit a surprising amount of functionally relevant diversity at all levels of taxonomic resolution, presenting a significant challenge for most modeling frameworks. A long-standing hope of theoretical ecology is that…
Despite the critical role of functional diversity (FD) in understanding ecological systems and processes, its robust quantification remains a significant challenge. A long-held view in the field is that it is not possible to capture its…
Africa is experiencing extensive biodiversity loss due to rapid changes in the environment, where natural resources constitute the main instrument for socioeconomic development and a mainstay source of livelihoods for an increasing…
The applicability of computational models to the biological world is an active topic of debate. We argue that a useful path forward results from abandoning hard boundaries between categories and adopting an observer-dependent, pragmatic…
Most conspicuous organisms are multicellular and most multicellular organisms develop somatic cells to perform specific, non-reproductive tasks. The ubiquity of this division of labor suggests that it is highly advantageous. In this paper,…
Assembling optimal microbial communities is key for various applications in biofuel production, agriculture, and human health. Finding the optimal community is challenging because the number of possible communities grows exponentially with…
Population diversity is crucial in evolutionary algorithms to enable global exploration and to avoid poor performance due to premature convergence. This book chapter reviews runtime analyses that have shown benefits of population diversity,…
This is a preliminary article stating and proving a new maximum entropy theorem. The entropies that we consider can be used as measures of biodiversity. In that context, the question is: for a given collection of species, which frequency…
Multimodal Foundation Models (FMs) offer a path to learn general-purpose representations from heterogeneous ecological data, easily transferable to downstream tasks. However, practical biodiversity modelling remains fragmented; separate…
Two species with similar resource requirements respond in a characteristic way to variations in their habitat -- their abundances rise and fall in concert. We use this idea to learn how bacterial populations in the microbiota respond to…
In order to understand the role of space in ecological communities where each species produces a certain type of resource and has varying abilities to exploit the resources produced by its own species and by the other species, we carry out…
The intensification of European agriculture, characterized by increasing farm sizes, landscape simplification and reliance on synthetic pesticides, remains a key driver of biodiversity decline. While many studies have investigated this…
Ecological selection is a major driver of community assembly. Selection is classified as stabilizing when species with intermediate trait values gain the highest reproductive success, whereas selection is considered directional when fitness…
Growing anthropogenic pressures have increased the need for robust predictive models. Meeting this demand requires approaches that can handle bigger data to yield forecasts that capture the variability and underlying uncertainty of…
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…
Although networks provide a powerful approach to study a large variety of ecological systems, their formulation does not typically account for multiple interaction types, interactions that vary in space and time, and interconnected systems…
A primary motivation for our research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. Ecosystems are thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex,…