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Resolving the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning has been one of the central goals of modern ecology. Early debates about the relationship were finally resolved with the advent of a statistical partitioning scheme…
The storage effect is a general explanation for ecological coexistence, wherein different species specialize on different states of a fluctuating environment, e.g., hot vs. cold years. Despite the storage effect's prominence in theoretical…
Over the last decade several attempts have been made to extend biodiversity studies in ways that would allow researchers to explore how biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships may change across different spatial and temporal…
Extensive research shows that more species-rich assemblages are generally more productive and efficient in resource use than comparable assemblages with fewer species. But the question of how diversity simultaneously affects the wide…
Biological diversity is known to play an important role in generating and maintaining ecosystem productivity and other functions, and has consequently become a central focus of many efforts to preserve ecosystem services. Theoretical…
The Loreau and Hector (2019) Comment on our paper (Pillai and Gouhier, 2019) failed to address the two core elements of our critique, both the circularity of the BEF research program, in general, and the mathematical flaws of the…
Understanding functional diversity, the range and variability of species' roles and actions within their communities, is key to predicting and preserving the functions that sustain both nature and human well-being. In this paper, we provide…
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…
Empirical observations in marine ecosystems have suggested a balance of biological and advection time scales as a possible explanation of species coexistence. To characterise this scenario, we measure the time to fixation in neutrally…
Relations among species in ecosystems can be represented by complex networks where both negative (competition) and positive (mutualism) interactions are concurrently present. Recently, it has been shown that many ecosystems can be cast into…
Coral reefs are crucial to marine biodiversity and rely on a delicate symbiotic relationship between corals and zooxanthellae algae. Water temperature variations, however, disrupt this association, leading to coral bleaching events that…
Collective behaviour in living systems is observed across many scales, from bacteria to insects, to fish shoals. Zebrafish have emerged as a model system amenable to laboratory study. Here we report a three-dimensional study of the…
Statistical averaging and asynchronous population dynamics as portfolio mechanisms are considered as the most important processes with which biodiversity contributes to ecosystem stability. However, portfolio theories usually regard…
Populations of species in ecosystems are often constrained by availability of resources within their environment. In effect this means that a growth of one population, needs to be balanced by comparable reduction in populations of others.…
We demonstrate that the issues described in the Wagg et al. (2019) Comment on our paper (Pillai and Gouhier, 2019) are all due to misunderstandings about the implications of pairwise effects, the nature of the null baseline in both our…
A recent paper by James et al. finds that mutualistic interactions decrease the biodiversity of model ecosystems. However, this result can be reverted if we consider ecological trade-offs and choose parameters suitable for sparse…
The abundance of a species' population in an ecosystem is rarely stationary, often exhibiting large fluctuations over time. Using historical data on marine species, we show that the year-to-year fluctuations of population growth rate obey a…
The spatial scale of population synchrony gives the characteristic distance at which the population fluctuations are correlated. Therefore, it gives also the characteristic size of the regions of simultaneous population depletion, or even…
From bird flocks to fish schools, animal groups often seem to react to environmental perturbations as if of one mind. Most studies in collective animal behaviour have aimed to understand how a globally ordered state may emerge from simple…
The impact of environmental fluctuation on species diversity is studied with a model of the evolutionary ecology of microorganisms. We show that environmental fluctuation induces evolutionary branching and assures the consequential…