Related papers: The glocal forest
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…
There are many scales at which to quantify stability in spatial and ecological networks. Local-scale analyses focus on specific nodes of the spatial network, while regional-scale analyses consider the whole network. Similarly, species- and…
Ecological networks are theoretical abstractions that represent ecological communities. These networks are usually defined as static entities, in which the occurrence of a particular interaction between species is considered fixed despite…
In hierarchical models, density fluctuations on different scales are correlated. This induces correlations between dark halo masses, their formation histories, and their larger-scale environments. In turn, this produces a correlation…
In the present study it is shown that significant impacts on forests can lead to large climate fluctuations at global level. This research takes into account various scenarios for the reconstruction of forest areas using the geo-ecological…
Residuals in regression models are often spatially correlated. Prominent examples include studies in environmental epidemiology to understand the chronic health effects of pollutants. I consider the effects of residual spatial structure on…
Many ecological and spatial processes are complex in nature and are not accurately modeled by linear models. Regression trees promise to handle the high-order interactions that are present in ecological and spatial datasets, but fail to…
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…
We propose here to interpret and model peculiar plant morphologies (cushions, tussocks) observed in the Andean altiplano as localized structures. Such structures resulting in a patchy, aperiodic aspect of the vegetation cover are…
There has been a considerable effort to understand and quantify the spatial distribution of species across different ecosystems. Relative species abundance (RSA), beta diversity and species area relationship (SAR) are among the most used…
Random forests are a powerful method for non-parametric regression, but are limited in their ability to fit smooth signals, and can show poor predictive performance in the presence of strong, smooth effects. Taking the perspective of random…
Spatial distribution of the human population is distinctly heterogeneous, e.g. showing significant difference in the population density between urban and rural areas. In the historical perspective, i.e. on the timescale of centuries, the…
Forest-savanna bistability - the hypothesis that forests and savannas exist as alternative stable states in the tropics - and its implications are key challenges for mathematical modelers and ecologists in the context of ongoing climate…
We present convincing empirical evidence for an effective and general strategy for building accurate small models. Such models are attractive for interpretability and also find use in resource-constrained environments. The strategy is to…
Random forests are a learning algorithm proposed by Breiman [Mach. Learn. 45 (2001) 5--32] that combines several randomized decision trees and aggregates their predictions by averaging. Despite its wide usage and outstanding practical…
We introduce random spatial forests, a method of bagging regression trees allowing for spatial correlation. Our main contribution is the development of a computationally efficient tree building algorithm which selects each split of the tree…
Recent studies of cluster distribution in various ecosystems revealed Pareto statistics for the size of spatial colonies. These results were supported by cellular automata simulations that yield robust criticality for endogenous pattern…
The presence of one or more species at some spatial locations but not others is a central matter in ecology. This phenomenon is related to ecological pattern formation. Nonlocal interactions can be considered as one of the mechanisms…
The forest fire model is a reaction-diffusion model where energy, in the form of trees, is injected uniformly, and burned (dissipated) locally. We show that the spatial distribution of fires forms a novel geometric structure where the…
We present a spatial, individual-based predator-prey model in which dispersal is dependent on the local community. We determine species suitability to the biotic conditions of their local environment through a time and space varying fitness…