Related papers: One size does not fit all: the complex relationshi…

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…

Multiple mechanisms have been proposed to explain how greenery enhances their mental wellbeing. Mediation studies, however, focus on a limited number of mechanisms and rely on remotely sensed greenery measures, which do not accurately…

Nature provides a myriad of intangible and non-material services to people. However, urbanites are increasingly disconnected from the natural world. The consequences of this progressive disconnection from nature remain difficult to measure…

Social ties are strongly related to well-being. But what characterizes this relationship? This study investigates social mechanisms explaining how social ties affect well-being through social integration and social influence, and how…

The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…

What determines biodiversity in nature is a prominent issue in ecology, especially in biotic resource systems that are typically devoid of cross-feeding. Here, we show that by incorporating pairwise encounters among consumer individuals…

Resolving the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning has been one of the central goals of modern ecology. Early debates about the relationship were finally resolved with the advent of a statistical partitioning scheme…

The rapid advancement of environmental sequencing technologies, such as metagenomics, has significantly enhanced our ability to study microbial communities. The eubiotic composition of these communities is crucial for maintaining ecological…

Improved monitoring and associated inferential tools to efficiently identify declining bird populations, particularly of rare or sparsely distributed species, is key to informed conservation and management across large spatio-temporal…

Many studies have analyzed how variability in reproductive success affects fitness. However, each study tends to focus on a particular problem, leaving unclear the overall structure of variability in populations. This fractured conceptual…

The role of species interactions in controlling the interplay between the stability of an ecosystem and its biodiversity is still not well understood. The ability of ecological communities to recover after a small perturbation of the…

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…

Measures of biodiversity change such as the Living Planet Index describe proportional change in the abundance of a typical species, which can be thought of as change in the size of a community. Here, I discuss the orthogonal concept of…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the world, but its impacts on the environment and human well-being remain uncertain. We conducted a systematic literature review of 1,291 studies selected from 6,655 records, identifying the main…

Over the last decade several attempts have been made to extend biodiversity studies in ways that would allow researchers to explore how biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships may change across different spatial and temporal…

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…

Understanding the behaviors of ecological systems is challenging given their multi-faceted complexity. To proceed, theoretical models such as Lotka-Volterra dynamics with random interactions have been investigated by the dynamical…

Biologists measure information in different ways. Neurobiologists and researchers in bioinformatics often measure information using information-theoretic measures such as Shannon's entropy or mutual information. Behavioral biologists and…

One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a…

The maintenance of diversity, the `commonness of rarity', and compositional turnover are ubiquitous features of species-rich communities. Through a minimal model, we consider how these features reflect the interplay between environmental…