Related papers: Testing biodiversity using inhomogeneous summary s…
We wish to formally test for changes in the taxonomic diversity of a community, especially in the presence of high latent diversity. Drawing on the meta-analysis literature, we construct a model for diversity that accounts for covariate…
The theory of island biogeography[1] asserts that an island or a local community approaches an equilibrium species richness as a result of the interplay between the immigration of species from the much larger metacommunity source area and…
Diversity patterns of tree species in a tropical forest community are approached by a simple lattice model and investigated by Monte Carlo simulations using a backtracking method. Our spatially explicit neutral model is based on a simple…
Several theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explain observed biodiversity patterns, ranging from the classical niche-based theories, mainly employing a continuous formalism, to neutral theories, based on statistical mechanics of…
We analyze several florae (collections of plant species populating specific areas) in different geographic and climatic regions. For every list of species we produce a taxonomic classification tree and we consider its statistical…
Understanding the mechanisms that sustain high biodiversity remains a central challenge. MacArthur's classical consumer-resource model (MCRM) suggests that consumer diversity is limited by the number of available resources, yet empirical…
What determines biodiversity in nature is a prominent issue in ecology, especially in biotic resource systems that are typically devoid of cross-feeding. Here, we show that by incorporating pairwise encounters among consumer individuals…
We present novel analytical results about ecosystem species diversity that stem from a proposed coarse grained neutral model based on birth-death processes. The relevance of the problem lies in the urgency for understanding and synthesizing…
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…
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…
A complex two-parameter model resembling the classical voter model is introduced to describe macroecological properties of tropical tree communities. Monte-Carlo type computer simulations are performed on the model, investigating species…
Statistical Physics has proved essential to analyze multi-agent environments. Motivated by the empirical observation of various non-equilibrium features in Barro Colorado and other ecological systems, we analyze a plant-species abundance…
Monitoring the distribution of microfossils in stratigraphic successions is an essential tool for biostratigraphic, evolutionary and paleoecologic/paleoceanographic studies. To estimate the relative abundance (%) of a given species, it is…
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…
We consider an aggregation model for two interacting species. The coupling between the species is via their velocities, that incorporate self- and cross-interactions. Our main interest is categorizing the possible steady states of the…
Quantitative methods for studying biodiversity have been traditionally rooted in the classical theory of finite frequency tables analysis. However, with the help of modern experimental tools, like high throughput sequencing, we now begin to…
Coevolutionary dynamics is investigated in chemical catalysis, biological evolution, social and economic systems. The dynamics of these systems can be analyzed within the unifying framework of evolutionary game theory. In this Letter, we…
Statistical inference on biodiversity has a rich history going back to RA Fisher. An influential ecological theory suggests the existence of a fundamental biodiversity number, denoted $\alpha$, which coincides with the precision parameter…
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 is the second of two papers dedicated to the relationship between population models of competition and biodiversity. Here we consider species assembly models where the population dynamics is kept far from fixed points through the…