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Source-sink systems are metapopulations of habitat patches with different, and possibly temporally varying, habitat qualities, which are commonly used in ecology to study the fate of spatially extended natural populations. We propose new…
The relationships which characterise the outcomes of the interactions between firms in the economy appear to follow power law behaviour. In particular, there is evidence that the empirical power laws which relate the size of an extinction…
Despite the general acknowledgment of the role of niche and fitness differences in community dynamics, species abundance has been coined as a relevant feature not just regarding niche perspectives, but also according to neutral…
We are interested in the impact of natural selection in a prey-predator community. We introduce an individual-based model of the community that takes into account both prey and predator phenotypes. Our aim is to understand the phenotypic…
Entropy relates the fast, microscopic behaviour of the elements in a system to its slow, macroscopic state. We propose to use it to explain how, as complexity theory suggests, small scale decisions of individuals form cities. For this, we…
The human niche represents the intersection of biological, ecological, cultural, and technological processes that have co-evolved to shape human adaptation and societal complexity. This paper explores the human niche through the lens of…
Scientists investigate the dynamics of complex systems with quantitative models, employing them to synthesize knowledge, to explain observations, and to forecast future system behavior. Complete specification of systems is impossible, so…
Biological organisms exhibit diverse strategies for adapting to varying environments. For example, a population of organisms may express the same phenotype in all environments (`unvarying strategy'), or follow environmental cues and express…
Food web topology and energy flow rates across food web linkages can influence ecosystem properties such as stability. Stability predictions from current models of energy flow are often sensitive to details in their formulation, and their…
Many biological systems regulate phenotypic heterogeneity as a fitness-maximising strategy in uncertain and dynamic environments. Analysis of such strategies is typically confined both to a discrete set of environmental conditions, and to a…
In this work we address the analysis of discrete-time models of structured metapopulations subject to environmental stochasticity. Previous works on these models made use of the fact that migrations between the patches can be considered…
Predictions of biodiversity trajectories under climate change are crucial in order to act effectively in maintaining the diversity of species. In many ecological applications, future predictions are made under various global warming…
Modelling multiple network data is crucial for addressing a wide range of applied research questions. However, there are many challenges, both theoretical and computational, to address. Network cycles are often of particular interest in…
During the last decades macroecology has identified broad-scale patterns of abundances and diversity of microbial communities and put forward some potential explanations for them. However, these advances are not paralleled by a full…
Species distribution models (SDMs) commonly produce probabilistic occurrence predictions that must be converted into binary presence-absence maps for ecological inference and conservation planning. However, this binarization step is…
Protected natural areas are regions that have been minimally affected by human activities such as urbanization, agriculture, and other human interventions. To better understand and map the naturalness of these areas, machine learning models…
Ecosystems are among the most interesting and well-studied examples of self-organized complex systems. Community ecology, the study of how species interact with each other and the environment, has a rich tradition. Over the last few years,…
Joint modeling of spatially-oriented dependent variables is commonplace in the environmental sciences, where scientists seek to estimate the relationships among a set of environmental outcomes accounting for dependence among these outcomes…
Determining the relative importance of environmental factors, biotic interactions and stochasticity in assembling and maintaining species-rich communities remains a major challenge in ecology. In plant communities, interactions between…
The networks of predator-prey interactions in ecological systems are remarkably complex, but nevertheless surprisingly stable in terms of long term persistence of the system as a whole. In order to understand the mechanism driving the…