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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…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
Persistent economic competition is often justified as a mechanism of innovation, efficiency, and welfare maximization. Yet empirical evidence across disciplines reveals that competition systematically generates fragility, inequality, and…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…
Global species richness is a key biodiversity metric. Despite recent efforts to estimate global species richness, the resulting estimates have been highly uncertain and often logically inconsistent. Estimates lower down either the taxonomic…
The twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss define a strong need for functional diversity monitoring. While the availability of high-quality ecological monitoring data is increasing, the quantification of functional diversity so…
Research over the past few decades has assumed the richness (number of species) to be the primary driver of the biodiversity and ecosystem function (BEF) relationship. However, biodiversity is multi-dimensional, and richness alone does not…
Biodiversity widely observed in ecological systems is attributed to the dynamical balance among the competing species. The time-varying populations of the interacting species are often captured rather well by a set of deterministic…
Ecosystems display a complex spatial organization. Ecologists have long tried to characterize them by looking at how different measures of biodiversity change across spatial scales. Ecological neutral theory has provided simple predictions…
The complexity of an ecological community can be distilled into a network, where diverse interactions connect species in a web of dependencies. Species interact not only with each other but indirectly through environmental effects, however…
We investigate the formation of stable ecological networks where many species share the same resource. We show that such stable ecosystem naturally occurs as a result of extinctions. We obtain an analytical relation for the number of…
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…
The robustness of an ecological network quantifies the resilience of the ecosystem it represents to species loss. It corresponds to the proportion of species that are disconnected from the rest of the network when extinctions occur…
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…
Biodiversity loss driven by agricultural intensification is a pressing global issue, with significant implications for ecosystem stability and human well-being. Existing policy instruments have so far proven insufficient in halting this…
The commonly observed negative correlation between the number of species in an ecological community and disease risk, typically referred to as "the dilution effect", has received a substantial amount of attention over the past decade.…
The consensus that complexity begets stability in ecosystems was challenged in the seventies, a result recently extended to ecologically-inspired networks. The approaches assume the existence of a feasible equilibrium, i.e. with positive…
Enhancing urban biodiversity is increasingly advanced as a nature-based solution that can help align public health and biodiversity conservation agendas. Yet, research on the relationship between biodiversity and psychological well-being…
Explaining biodiversity in nature is a fundamental problem in ecology. An outstanding challenge is embodied in the so-called Competitive Exclusion Principle: two species competing for one limiting resource cannot coexist at constant…
The magnitude and variability of Earth's biodiversity have puzzled scientists ever since paleontologic fossil databases became available. We identify and study a model of interdependent species where both endogenous and exogenous impacts…