Related papers: Stochastic spatial models in ecology: a statistica…
Neutral models, in which individual agents with equal fitness undergo a birth-death-mutation process, are very popular in population genetics and community ecology. Usually these models are applied to populations and communities with…
One of the first successes of neutral ecology was to predict realistically-broad distributions of rare and abundant species. However, it has remained an outstanding theoretical challenge to describe how this distribution of abundances…
This thesis focuses on the applications of mathematical tools and concepts brought from nonequilibrium statistical physics to the modeling of ecological problems. The first part provides a short introduction where the theoretical concepts…
Spontaneous symmetry breaking plays a fundamental role in many areas of condensed matter and particle physics. A fundamental problem in ecology is the elucidation of the mechanisms responsible for biodiversity and stability. Neutral theory,…
Neutral dynamics, where taxa are assumed to be demographically equivalent and their abundance is governed solely by the stochasticity of the underlying birth-death process, has proved itself as an important minimal model that accounts for…
We give a overview of stochastic models of evolution that have found applications in genetics, ecology and linguistics for an audience of nonspecialists, especially statistical physicists. In particular, we focus mostly on neutral models in…
We discuss the relevance of studying ecology within the framework of Complexity Science from a statistical mechanics approach. Ecology is concerned with understanding how systems level properties emerge out of the multitude of interactions…
State-space models (SSMs) are an important modeling framework for analyzing ecological time series. These hierarchical models are commonly used to model population dynamics, animal movement, and capture-recapture data, and are now…
Environmental and climate processes are often distributed over large space-time domains. Their complexity and the amount of available data make modelling and analysis a challenging task. Statistical modelling of environment and climate data…
Over the last few decades, ecologists have come to appreciate that key ecological patterns, which describe ecological communities at relatively large spatial scales, are not only scale dependent, but also intimately intertwined. The…
Understanding the forces shaping ecological communities is crucially important to basic science and conservation. In recent years, considerable progress was made in explaining communities using simple and general models, with neutral theory…
We develop an theoretical approach for predicting biodiversity in multi-dimensional niche spaces, arising due to ecological drivers such as competitive exclusion. The novelty of our approach relies on the fact that ecological niches are…
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…
In this paper we introduce a class of stochastic population models based on "patch dynamics". The size of the patch may be varied, and this allows one to quantify the departures of these stochastic models from various mean field theories,…
We present a non-neutral stochastic model for the dynamics taking place in a meta-community ecosystems in presence of migration. The model provides a framework for describing the emergence of multiple ecological scenarios and behaves in two…
Spatially extended population dynamics models that incorporate intrinsic noise serve as case studies for the role of fluctuations and correlations in biological systems. Including spatial structure and stochastic noise in predator-prey…
Despite its radical assumption of ecological equivalence between species, neutral biodiversity theory can often provide good fits to species abundance distributions observed in nature. Major criticisms of neutral theory have focused on…
Niche and neutral theory are two prevailing, yet much debated, ideas in ecology proposed to explain the patterns of biodiversity. Whereas niche theory emphasizes selective differences between species and interspecific interactions in…
Spatial patterns are widely observed in numerous nonequilibrium natural systems, often undergoing complex transitions and bifurcations, thereby exhibiting significant importance in many physical and biological systems such as embryonic…
Quantitative predictions about the processes that promote species coexistence are a subject of active research in ecology. In particular, competitive interactions are known to shape and maintain ecological communities, and situations where…