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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…

We compare and contrast the long-time dynamical properties of two individual-based models of biological coevolution. Selection occurs via multispecies, stochastic population dynamics with reproduction probabilities that depend nonlinearly…

A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special conceptual challenges because of the strong mutual influences…

Predicting species persistence within ecological communities is a fundamental challenge for both empirical and theoretical ecology. Existing methods span from mechanistic models, whose parameters are difficult to estimate from data, to…

There is a broad recognition that commitment-based mechanisms can promote coordination and cooperative behaviours in both biological populations and self-organised multi-agent systems by making individuals' intentions explicit prior to…

'Evolutionary rescue' is the potential for evolution to enable population persistence in a changing environment. Even with eventual rescue, evolutionary time lags can cause the population size to temporarily fall below a threshold…

Due to the conventional distinction between ecological (rapid) and evolutionary (slow)timescales, ecological and population models to date have typically ignored the effects of evolution. Yet the potential for rapid evolutionary change has…

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…

Humans have been able to tackle biosphere complexities by acting as ecosystem engineers, profoundly changing the flows of matter, energy and information. This includes major innovations that allowed to reduce and control the impact of…

Many organisms live in populations structured by space and by class, exhibit plastic responses to their social partners, and are subject to non-additive ecological and fitness effects. Social evolution theory has long recognized that all of…

Antibiotic resistance is a major threat to global health. It emerges in multispecies microbial communities under antibiotic exposure. This makes antibiotic spectrum -- a drug's distribution of effects across species -- a potential key…

Many-variable differential equations with random coefficients provide powerful models for the dynamics of many interacting species in ecology. These models are known to exhibit a dynamical phase transition from a phase where population…

Microbial communities routinely have several possible species compositions or community states observed for the same environmental parameters. Changes in these parameters can trigger abrupt and persistent transitions (regime shifts) between…

Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…

Scaling laws in ecology, intended both as functional relationships among ecologically-relevant quantities and the probability distributions that characterize their occurrence, have long attracted the interest of empiricists and…

Market-based conservation instruments, such as payments, auctions or tradable permits, are environmental policies that create financial incentives for landowners to engage in voluntary conservation on their land. But what if ecological…

Addressing both natural and societal challenges requires collective cooperation. Studies on collective-risk social dilemmas have shown that individual decisions are influenced by the perceived risk of collective failure. However, existing…

In order to understand the role of space in ecological communities where each species produces a certain type of resource and has varying abilities to exploit the resources produced by its own species and by the other species, we carry out…

The environment has a strong influence on a population's evolutionary dynamics. Driven by both intrinsic and external factors, the environment is subject to continual change in nature. To capture an ever-changing environment, we consider a…

Feedback-evolving games is a framework that models the co-evolution between payoff functions and an environmental state. It serves as a useful tool to analyze many social dilemmas such as natural resource consumption, behaviors in…