Related papers: The soil seed bank can buffer long-term compositio…
Dry-land ecosystem has turned into a matter of grave concern, due to growing threat of land degradation and bioproductivity-loss. Self-organized vegetation patterns are a remarkable characteristic of these ecosystems; apart from being…
Cell colonies of bacteria, tumour cells and fungi, under nutrient limited growth conditions, exhibit complex branched growth patterns. In order to investigate this phenomenon we present a simple hybrid cellular automaton model of cell…
Although riparian vegetation is present in or along many water courses of the world, its active role resulting from the interaction with flow and sediment processes has only recently become an active field of research. Especially, the role…
D. discoideum has been recently suggested as an example of bet-hedging. Upon starvation a population of unicellular amoebae splits between aggregators, which form a fruiting body made of a stalk and resistant spores, and non-aggregators.…
The response of dynamical systems to varying conditions and disturbances is a fundamental aspect of their analysis. In spatially extended systems, particularly in pattern-forming systems, there are many possible responses, including…
On a global level, ecological communities are being perturbed at an unprecedented rate by human activities and environmental instabilities. Yet, we understand little about what factors facilitate or impede long-term persistence of these…
Predicting species distributions using occupancy models accounting for imperfect detection is now commonplace in ecology. Recently, modelling spatial and temporal autocorrelation was proposed to alleviate the lack of replication in…
Patches of vegetation consist of dense clusters of shrubs, grass, or trees, often found to be circular characteristic size, defined by the properties of the vegetation and terrain. Therefore, vegetation patches can be interpreted as…
Eradicating hunger and malnutrition is a key development goal of the 21st century. We address the problem of optimally identifying seed varieties to reliably increase crop yield within a risk-sensitive decision-making framework.…
We provide a machine learning solution that replaces the traditional methods for deciding the pesticide application time of Sunn Pest. We correlate climate data with phases of Sunn Pest in its life-cycle and decide whether the fields should…
Growing mixtures of annual arable crop species or genotypes is a promising way to improve crop production without increasing agricultural inputs. To design optimal crop mixtures, choices of species, genotypes, sowing proportion, plant…
Sustainable agriculture in the 21st century requires the production of sufficient food while reducing the environmental impact and safeguarding human livelihoods. Many studies have confirmed agricultural diversification practices such as…
A minimalist stochastic model of primary soil salinity is proposed, in which the rate of soil salinization is determined by the balance between dry and wet salt deposition and the intermittent leaching events caused by rainfall events. The…
Coral reefs are dynamic systems whose composition is highly influenced by unpredictable biotic and abiotic factors. Understanding the spatial scale at which long-term predictions of reef composition can be made will be crucial for guiding…
A dynamical model of an ecological community is analyzed within a "mean-field approximation" in which one of the species interacts with the combination of all of the other species in the community. Within this approximation the model may be…
Microbial communities feature an immense diversity of species and this diversity is linked with outcomes ranging from ecosystem stability to medical prognoses. Yet the mechanisms underlying microbial diversity are under debate. While simple…
Employing an effective cellular automata model, we investigate and analyze the build-up and erosion of soil. Depending on the strategy employed for handling agricultural production, in many cases we find a critical dependence on the…
If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…
From infiltration of water into the soil during rainstorms to seasonal plant growth and death, the ecohydrological processes that are thought to be relevant to the formation of banded vegetation patterns in drylands occur across multiple…
Desert surfaces are typically non uniform, with individual sand dunes generally surrounded by gravel or non-erodible beds. Similarly, beaches vary in composition and moisture that enhances cohesion between the grains. These bed…