Related papers: The soil seed bank can buffer long-term compositio…
Ecological trade-offs between species are often invoked to explain species coexistence in ecological communities. However, few mathematical models have been proposed for which coexistence conditions can be characterized explicitly in terms…
Understanding the forces shaping ecological communities is crucially important to basic science and conservation. In recent years, considerable progress was made in explaining communities using simple and general models, with neutral theory…
Environmental stochasticity is known to be a destabilizing factor, increasing abundance fluctuations and extinction rates of populations. However, the stability of a community may benefit from the differential response of species to…
In the Sahel region the population depends largely on rain-fed agriculture. In West Africa in particular, climate models turn to be unable to capture some basic features of present-day climate variability. This study proposes a contribution…
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 competition for resources is a defining feature of microbial communities. In many contexts, from soils to host-associated communities, highly diverse microbes are organized into metabolic groups or guilds with similar resource…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
Farmed landscapes provide a natural laboratory to test how management reshapes near-surface hydrodynamics. Combining distributed acoustic sensing with physics-based hydromechanical modeling, we tracked minute-resolution, meter-scale changes…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
Microbial ecosystems are commonly modeled by fixed interactions between species in steady exponential growth states. However, microbes often modify their environments so strongly that they are forced out of the exponential state into…
We consider a size-structured aggregation and growth model of phytoplankton community proposed by Ackleh and Fitzpatrick [2]. The model accounts for basic biological phenomena in phytoplankton community such as growth, gravitational…
Longevity of a taxonomic group is an important issue in understanding the dynamics of evolution. In this respect a key observation is that genera, families or orders can each be assigned a characteristic average lifetime [Van Valen, L.,…
Pristine coastal shallow systems are usually dominated by extensive meadows of seagrass species, which are assumed to take advantage of nutrient supply from sediment. An increasing nutrient input is thought to favour phytoplankton,…
Despite the common misconception of nearly static organisms, plants do interact continuously with the environment and with each other. It is fair to assume that during their evolution they developed particular features to overcome problems…
Due to climate change, overgrazing, and deforestation, arid ecosystems are vulnerable to desertification and land degradation. As aridity increases, vegetation cover loses spatial homogeneity and self-organizes into heterogeneous vegetation…
We develop a trait-based model founded on the hypothesis that biological systems evolve and organize to maximize entropy production by dissipating chemical and electromagnetic potentials over longer time scales than abiotic processes by…
Development of a spatial-temporal and data-driven model of soil respiration at the global scale based on soil temperature, yearly soil moisture, and soil organic carbon (C) estimates. Prediction of soil respiration on an annual basis…
We mathematically model the uptake of phosphorus by a soil community consisting of a plant and two bacterial groups: copiotrophs and oligotrophs. Four equilibrium states emerge, one for each of the species monopolising the resource and…
Understanding the relationship between complexity and stability in large dynamical systems -- such as ecosystems -- remains a key open question in complexity theory which has inspired a rich body of work developed over more than fifty…
In this article, we introduce a random (directed) graph model for the simultaneous forwards and backwards description of a rather broad class of Cannings models with a seed bank mechanism. This provides a simple tool to establish a sampling…