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Study of exoplanets has been of considerable interest for Astronomers, Planetary Scientists and Astrobiologists. Analysis of huge planetary data from space missions such as CoRoT and Kepler is directed ultimately at finding a planet similar…
One of the first beings affected by changes in the climate are trees, one of our most vital resources. In this study tree species interaction and the response to climate in different ecological environments is observed by applying a joint…
We introduce a new model for large scale evolution and extinction in which species are organized into food chains. The system evolves by two processes: origination/speciation and extinction. In the model, extinction of a given species can…
Climate transitions on exoplanets offer valuable insights into the atmospheric processes governing planetary habitability. Previous pure-steam atmospheric models show a thermal limit in outgoing long-wave radiation, which has been used to…
We introduce a model of biological evolution where species evolve in response to biotic interactions and a fluctuating environmental stress. The species may either become extinct or mutate to acquire a new fitness value when the effective…
In this hypothesis article, we discuss the basic requirements of planetary environments where aerobe organisms can grow and survive, including atmospheric limitations of millimeter-to-meter-sized biological animal life based on physical…
How good is our universe at making habitable planets? The answer to this depends on which factors are important for life: Does a planet need to be Earth mass? Does it need to be inside the temperate zone? are systems with hot Jupiters…
In this Research Note, I use my single-column climate model to explicitly show that the moist greenhouse surface temperature threshold is sensitive to stratospheric temperature. I argue that this explains most of the discrepancy between 1-D…
From estimates of the near-surface heat capacity of planets it is shown that the thermal time scale is larger than the orbital period in the presence of a global ocean that is well-mixed to a depth of 100 m, or of an atmosphere with a…
Species extinction is a core process that affects the diversity of life on Earth. Competition between species in a population is considered by ecological niche-based theories as a key factor leading to different severity of species…
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…
There exists a positive correlation between orbital eccentricity and the average stellar flux that planets receive from their parent star. Often, though, it is assumed that the average equilibrium temperature would correspondingly increase…
Macroevolution is considered as a problem of stochastic dynamics in a system with many competing agents. Evolutionary events (speciations and extinctions) are triggered by fitness records found by random exploration of the agents' fitness…
Ecosystems often undergo abrupt regime shifts in response to gradual external changes. These shifts are theoretically understood as a regime switch between alternative stable states of the ecosystem dynamical response to smooth changes in…
Two future scenarios that are not explicitly in the range of scenarios (the Representative Concentration Pathway scenarios) utilised by the IPCC. These two scenarios are the emissions trend under peak fossil fuel (for example, Mohr et al.,…
Carbon dioxide is one of the major contributors to the radiative forcing, increasing both the temperature and the humidity of Earth's atmosphere. If the stellar irradiance increases and water becomes abundant in the stratosphere of an…
In a complex community, species continuously adapt to each other. On rare occasions, the adaptation of a species can lead to the extinction of others, and even its own. "Adaptive dynamics" is the standard mathematical framework to describe…
Theoretical ecologists have long sought to understand how the persistence of populations depends on biotic and abiotic factors. Classical work showed that demographic stochasticity causes the mean time to extinction to increase…
Record-breaking temperature events are now very frequently in the news, viewed as evidence of climate change. With this as motivation, we undertake the first substantial spatial modeling investigation of temperature record-breaking across…
We study the mitigation of climate tipping point transitions using an energy balance model. The evolution of the global mean surface temperature is coupled with the CO2 concentration through the green house effect. We model the CO2…