Related papers: Data-driven competitive facilitative tree interact…
Plant survival is a key factor in forest dynamics and survival probabilities often vary across life stages. Studies specifically aimed at assessing tree survival are unusual and so data initially designed for other purposes often need to be…
In the face of uncertain biological response to climate change and the many critiques concerning model complexity it is increasingly important to develop predictive mechanistic frameworks that capture the dominant features of ecological…
We propose a model equation for the dynamics of tree density in mesic savannas. It considers long-range competition among trees and the effect of fire acting as a local facilitation mechanism. Despite short-range facilitation is taken to…
The distributions of species lifetimes and species in space are related, since species with good local survival chances have more time to colonize new habitats and species inhabiting large areas have higher chances to survive local…
To model discriminative, i.e. competition induced, self-thinning in even-aged forest stands a concept has been explored that discriminative mortality alters spatial arrangement of trees which in turn alters the mortality. Function of…
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…
Fire is an indissoluble component of ecosystems, however quantifying the effects of fire on vegetation is challenging task as fire lies outside the typical experimental design attributes. A recent simulation study showed that under…
Mathematical modelling of the evolution of the size-spectrum dynamics in aquatic ecosystems was discovered to be a powerful tool to have a deeper insight into impacts of human- and environmental driven changes on the marine ecosystem. In…
Natural ecosystems are characterized by striking diversity of form and functions and yet exhibit deep symmetries emerging across scales of space, time and organizational complexity. Species-area relationships and species-abundance…
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…
Water availability is a major environmental driver affecting riparian and wetland vegetation. The interaction between water table fluctuations and vegetation in a stochastic environment contributes to the complexity of the dynamics of these…
Concerns about biodiversity and the long-term stability of forest ecosystems have lead to changing attitudes with respect to plantations. These artificial communities are ubiquitous, yet provide reduced habitat value in comparison to their…
Positive density-dependence occurs when individuals experience increased survivorship, growth, or reproduction with increased population densities. Mechanisms leading to these positive relationships include mate limitation, saturating…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
Vegetation patterns are abundant in arid and semiarid ecosystems, but how they form remains unclear. One of the most extended theories lies in the existence of scale-dependent feedbacks (SDF) in plant-to-plant and plant-water interactions.…
The savanna biome is characterised by a continuous vegetation cover, comprised of herbaceous and woody plants. The coexistence of species in arid savannas, where water availability is the main limiting resource for plant growth, provides an…
Fires and rainfall are major mechanisms that regulate woody and grassy biomasses in savanna ecosystems. Conditions of long-lasting coexistence of trees and grasses have been mainly studied using continuous-time modelling of tree-grass…
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…
Traditional approaches to ecosystem modelling have relied on spatially homogeneous approximations to interaction, growth and death. More recently, spatial interaction and dispersal have also been considered. While these leads to certain…
Population-level scaling in ecological systems arises from individual growth and death with competitive constraints. We build on a minimal dynamical model of metabolic growth where the tension between individual growth and mortality…