Related papers: Spatial patterns in the tropical forest reveal con…
Antipredator behaviour is a self-preservation strategy present in many biological systems, where individuals join the effort in a collective reaction to avoid being caught by an approaching predator. We study a nonhierarchical tritrophic…
From bird flocks to fish schools, animal groups often seem to react to environmental perturbations as if of one mind. Most studies in collective animal behaviour have aimed to understand how a globally ordered state may emerge from simple…
Mesoscale convective systems MCSs play a central role in tropical rainfall and are closely linked to extreme precipitation and large scale variability. However, a quantitative understanding of their environmental controls remains…
Metapopulation theory for a long time has assumed dispersal to be symmetric, i.e. patches are connected through migrants dispersing bi-directionally without a preferred direction. However, for natural populations symmetry is often broken,…
Fixed effects models are very flexible because they do not make assumptions on the distribution of effects and can also be used if the heterogeneity component is correlated with explanatory variables. A disadvantage is the large number of…
The Amazon rainforest is considered one of the Earth's tipping elements and may lose stability under ongoing climate change. Recently a decrease in tropical rainforest resilience has been identified globally from remotely sensed vegetation…
Plant functional trait variation in tropical forests is central to predicting ecosystem responses to change. Informaiton on traits is limited relative to the diversity of climate, landforms, disturbance regimes and species present. These…
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…
Species distribution models usually attempt to explain presence-absence or abundance of a species at a site in terms of the environmental features (socalled abiotic features) present at the site. Historically, such models have considered…
The behavior of ecological systems mainly relies on the interactions between the species it involves. We consider the problem of inferring the species interaction network from abundance data. To be relevant, any network inference…
Several theoretical models predict that spatial patterning increases ecosystem resilience. However, these predictions rely on simplifying assumptions, such as assuming isotropic and infinitely large ecosystems, and empirical evidence…
We develop a finite-sample, design-based theory for random forests in which each tree is a randomized conditional predictor acting on fixed covariates and the forest is their Monte Carlo average. An exact variance identity separates Monte…
Antipredator behavior is present in many biological systems where individuals collectively react to an imminent attack. The antipredator response may influence spatial pattern formation and ecosystem stability but requires an organism's…
Hash codes are a very efficient data representation needed to be able to cope with the ever growing amounts of data. We introduce a random forest semantic hashing scheme with information-theoretic code aggregation, showing for the first…
We develop a mathematical model of extinction and coexistence in a generic predator-prey ecosystem composed of two herbivores in asymmetrical competition and a hunter exerting a predatory pressure on both species. With the aim of…
Ecosystems are commonly organized into trophic levels -- organisms that occupy the same level in a food chain (e.g., plants, herbivores, carnivores). A fundamental question in theoretical ecology is how the interplay between trophic…
Secondary forests now dominate tropical landscapes and play a crucial role in achieving COP15 conservation objectives. This study develops a replicable national approach to identifying and characterising forest ecosystems, with a focus on…
Mixed-species growth models are needed as a synthesis of ecological knowledge and for guiding forest management. Individual-tree models have been commonly used, but the difficulties of reliably scaling from the individual to the stand level…
The computation of feedback control using Dynamic Programming equation is a difficult task due the curse of dimensionality. The tree structure algorithm is one the methods introduced recently that mitigate this problem. The method computes…
We introduce a model of traveling agents ({\it e.g.} frugivorous animals) who feed on randomly located vegetation patches and disperse their seeds, thus modifying the spatial distribution of resources in the long term. It is assumed that…