Related papers: Going beyond richness: Modelling the BEF relations…
Research over the past few decades has assumed the richness (number of species) to be the primary driver of the biodiversity and ecosystem function (BEF) relationship. However, biodiversity is multi-dimensional, and richness alone does not…
Extensive research shows that more species-rich assemblages are generally more productive and efficient in resource use than comparable assemblages with fewer species. But the question of how diversity simultaneously affects the wide…
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…
1. Understanding the mechanisms underlying biological systems, and ultimately, predicting their behaviours in a changing environment requires overcoming the gap between mathematical models and experimental or observational data.…
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…
Accurate biodiversity monitoring is essential for effective environmental policy, yet current practices often rely on arbitrarily defined ecosystems, communities, and ad-hoc indicator species, limiting cost-efficiency and reproducibility.…
Complementarity among species with different traits is one of the basic processes affecting biodiversity, defined as the number of species in the ecosystem. We present here a soluble model ecosystem in which the species are characterized by…
We perform a full similarity analysis of an idealized ecosystem using Buckingham's $\Pi$ theorem to obtain dimensionless similarity parameters given that some (non- unique) method exists that can differentiate different functional groups of…
Understanding how species are distributed across landscapes over time is a fundamental question in biodiversity research. Unfortunately, most species distribution models only target a single species at a time, despite strong ecological…
Deep learning is used in computer vision problems with important applications in several scientific fields. In ecology for example, there is a growing interest in deep learning for automatizing repetitive analyses on large amounts of…
Ecosystems are governed by dynamic processes such as competition for resources, reproduction and dispersal. These shape their biodiversity and how the system responds to change. Current approaches to modelling ecosystems, especially plants,…
Speciation is the "elephant in the room" of community ecology. As the ultimate source of biodiversity, its integration in ecology's theoretical corpus is necessary to understand community assembly. Yet, speciation is often completely…
Mutualistic interactions, where individuals from different species can benefit from each other, are widespread across ecosystems. This study develops a general deterministic model of mutualism involving two populations, assuming that…
When making predictions about ecosystems, we often have available a number of different ecosystem models that attempt to represent their dynamics in a detailed mechanistic way. Each of these can be used as simulators of large-scale…
Social-ecological systems research aims to understand the nature of social-ecological phenomena, to find ways to foster or manage conditions under which desired phenomena occur or to reduce the negative consequences of undesirable…
Dynamics of species' abundances in ecological communities are often described using models that only account for a few species. It is not clear when and why this would be possible, as most species form part of diverse ecological…
Robust statistical data modelling under potential model mis-specification often requires leaving the parametric world for the nonparametric. In the latter, parameters are infinite dimensional objects such as functions, probability…
We introduce the Webworld model, which links together the ecological modelling of food web structure with the evolutionary modelling of speciation and extinction events. The model describes dynamics of ecological communities on an…
Detection heterogeneity is inherent to ecological data, arising from factors such as varied terrain or weather conditions, inconsistent sampling effort, or heterogeneity of individuals themselves. Incorporating additional covariates into a…
The assembly of ecological communities from a pool of species is central to ecology, but the effect of this process on properties of community interaction networks is still largely unknown. Here, we use a systematic analytical framework to…