Related papers: Biodiversity, extinctions and evolution of ecosyst…

Quantitative population modelling is an invaluable tool for identifying the cascading effects of ecosystem management and interventions. Ecosystem models are often constructed by assuming stability and coexistence in ecological communities…

Evolutionary dynamics are shaped by a variety of fundamental, generic drivers, including spatial structure, ecology, and selection pressure. These drivers impact the trajectory of evolution, and have been hypothesized to influence…

Microbial ecosystems are commonly modeled by fixed interactions between species in steady exponential growth states. However, microbes often modify their environments so strongly that they are forced out of the exponential state into…

Many species see their range shifted poleward in response to global warming and need to keep pace in order to survive. To understand the effect of climate change on species ranges and its consequences on population dynamics, we consider a…

We develop a landscape-flux framework to investigate observed frequency distributions of vegetation and the stability of these ecological systems under fluctuations. The frequency distributions can characterize the population-potential…

Biodiversity is essential to the viability of ecological systems. Species diversity in ecosystems is promoted by cyclic, non-hierarchical interactions among competing populations. Such non-transitive relations lead to an evolution with…

This work proposes to model the space environment as a stochastic dynamic network where each node is a group of objects of a given class, or species, and their relationship is represented by stochastic links. A set of stochastic dynamic…

A simple model of biological extinction with variable system size is presented that exhibits a power-law distribution of extinction event sizes. The model is a generalization of a model recently introduced by Newman (Proc. R. Soc. Lond.…

Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…

A deterministic two-species predator-prey model with prey herd behavior is considered incorporating mutual interference and the effect of fear. We provide guidelines to the dynamical analysis of biologically feasible equilibrium points. We…

Isolated populations ultimately go extinct because of the intrinsic noise of elementary processes. In multi-population systems extinction of a population may occur via more than one route. We investigate this generic situation in a simple…

Dispersal is a well recognized driver of ecological and evolutionary dynamics, and simultaneously an evolving trait. Dispersal evolution has traditionally been studied in single-species metapopulations so that it remains unclear how…

In abstract terms, ecosystem ecology is about determining when two ecosystems, superficially different, are alike in some deeper way. An external observer can choose any ecosystem property as being important. In contrast, two ecosystems are…

Joint species distribution models are popular in ecology for modeling covariate effects on species occurrence, while characterizing cross-species dependence. Data consist of multivariate binary indicators of the occurrences of different…

The study of interactions between multiple species in an ecosystem is an active and impactful direction of inquiry. This is true in particular for fragile systems in which even small perturbations of their functional parameters can produce…

Ecosystems face intensifying threats from climate change, overexploitation, and other human pressures, emphasizing the urgent need to identify keystone species and vulnerable ones. While established network-based measures often rely on a…

We use a classical combinatorial inequality to establish a Markov inequality for multivariate binary Markov processes on trees. We then apply this result, alongside with the FKG inequality, to compare the expected loss of biodiversity under…

We have generalized our ``unified'' model of evolutionary ecology by taking into account the possible movements of the organisms from one ``patch'' to another within the same eco-system. We model the spatial extension of the eco-system…

Difficulties identifying appropriate biodiversity impact metrics remain a major barrier to inclusion of biodiversity considerations in environmentally responsible investment. We propose and analyse a simple science-based local metric: the…

Species coexistence is one of the central themes in modern ecology. Coexistence is a prerequisite of biological diversity. However, the question arises how biodiversity can be reconciled with the statement of competition theory, which…