Related papers: The soil seed bank can buffer long-term compositio…
Plant-soil feedback is recognized as a causal mechanism for the emergence of vegetation patterns of the same species especially when water is not a limiting resource (e.g. humid environments). Nevertheless, in the field, plants rarely grow…
Markov community models have been applied to sessile organisms because such models facilitate estimation of transition probabilities by tracking species occupancy at many fixed observation points over multiple periods of time. Estimation of…
Ecosystems tend to fluctuate around stable equilibria in response to internal dynamics and environmental factors. Occasionally, they enter an unstable tipping region and collapse into an alternative stable state. Our understanding of how…
The storage effect is a general explanation for coexistence in a variable environment. The generality of the storage effect is both a strength - it can be quantified in many systems - and a challenge - there is not a clear relationship…
Organisms gain by anticipating future changes in the environment. Those environmental changes often follow stochastic trends. The greater the slope of the trend, the more likely the trend's momentum carries the future trend in the same…
Tropical cyclones (TC) are often generated from pre-existing ``seed" vortices. Seeds with higher persistence might have a higher chance to undergo TC genesis. What controls seed persistence remains unclear. This study proposes that…
In apparent contradiction to competition theory, the number of known, co-existing plankton species far exceeds their explicable biodiversity - a discrepancy termed the Paradox of the Plankton. We introduce a new game-theoretic model for…
The growth of complex populations, such as microbial communities, forests, and cities, occurs over vastly different spatial and temporal scales. Although research in different fields has developed detailed, system-specific models to…
Across plant communities worldwide, fire regimes reflect a combination of climatic factors and plant characteristics. To shed new light on the complex relationships between plant characteristics and fire regimes, we developed a new…
Banded patterns consisting of alternating bare soil and dense vegetation have been observed in water-limited ecosystems across the globe, often appearing along gently sloped terrain with the stripes aligned transverse to the elevation…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
Structured populations are ubiquitous across the biological sciences. Mathematical models of these populations allow us to understand how individual physiological traits drive the overall dynamics in aggregate. For example, linear age- or…
Patterned vegetation is a characteristic feature of many dryland ecosystems. While plant densities on the ecosystem-wide scale are typically low, a spatial self-organisation principle leads to the occurrence of alternating patches of high…
This note investigates the stability of both linear and nonlinear switched systems with average dwell time. Two new analysis methods are proposed. Different from existing approaches, the proposed methods take into account the sequence in…
1. Animal movement patterns contribute to our understanding of variation in breeding success and survival of individuals, and the implications for population dynamics. 2. Over time, sensor technology for measuring movement patterns has…
In this paper, we use an adaptive modeling framework to model and study how nutritional status (measured by the protein to carbohydrate ratio) may regulate population dynamics and foraging task allocation of social insect colonies.…
We study the effect of correlations in generation times on the dynamics of population growth of microorganisms. We show that any non-zero correlation that is due to cell-size regulation, no matter how small, induces long-term oscillations…
Uncovering structural properties of ecological networks is a crucial starting point of studying the system's stability in response to various types of perturbations. We analyze pollination and seed disposal networks, which are…
50 year-long time series from a Long Term Agronomic Experiment have been used to to investigate the effects of climate change on yields of Wheat and Maize. Trends and fluctuations, useful to estimate production forecasts and related risks…
There is a pressing need to better understand how microbial populations respond to antimicrobial drugs, and to find mechanisms to possibly eradicate antimicrobial-resistant cells. The inactivation of antimicrobials by resistant microbes can…