Related papers: Optimal land conservation decisions for multiple s…

To reduce global biodiversity loss, there is an urgent need to determine the most efficient allocation of conservation resources. Recently, there has been a growing trend for many governments to supplement public ownership and management of…

The self-protection of alliances against external invaders is a key concept behind the maintenance of biodiversity in the face of natural selection. But since these alliances, which can be formed by different numbers of competitors, can…

In this paper, we analyze the dynamics of a multi-species fisheries system in the presence of harvesting. We solve the problem of finding the optimal harvesting strategy for a mid-term horizon with a fixed final stock of each species, while…

Decision trees have been a very popular class of predictive models for decades due to their interpretability and good performance on categorical features. However, they are not always robust and tend to overfit the data. Additionally, if…

Biodiversity loss driven by agricultural intensification is a pressing global issue, with significant implications for ecosystem stability and human well-being. Existing policy instruments have so far proven insufficient in halting this…

We study a mathematical model of environments populated by both preys and predators, with the possibility for predators to actively compete for the territory. For this model we study existence and uniqueness of solutions, and their…

We introduce a new optimization framework to maximize the expected spread of cascades in networks. Our model allows a rich set of actions that directly manipulate cascade dynamics by adding nodes or edges to the network. Our motivating…

Market-based instruments such as payments, auctions or tradable permits have been proposed as flexible and cost-effective instruments for biodiversity conservation on private lands. Trading the service of conservation requires one to define…

Local coexistence of species in large ecosystems is traditionally explained within the broad framework of niche theory. However, its rationale hardly justifies rich biodiversity observed in nearly homogeneous environments. Here we consider…

Continuous space species distribution models (SDMs) have a long-standing history as a valuable tool in ecological statistical analysis. Geostatistical and preferential models are both common models in ecology. Geostatistical models are…

Policies to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss often assume that protecting carbon-rich forests provides co-benefits in terms of biodiversity, due to the spatial congruence of carbon stocks and biodiversity at biogeographic…

This paper combines the idea of a hierarchical distributed genetic algorithm with different inter-agent partnering strategies. Cascading clusters of sub-populations are built from bottom up, with higher-level sub-populations optimising…

Modern ecology has re-emphasized the need for a quantitative understanding of the original 'survival of the fittest theme' based on analyzis of the intricate trade-offs between competing evolutionary strategies that characterize the…

We analyze the long term behavior of interacting populations which can be controlled through harvesting. The dynamics is assumed to be discrete in time and stochastic due to the effect of environmental fluctuations. We present extinction…

The quest on how to collectively self-organize in order to maximize the survival chances of the members of a social group requires finding an optimal compromise between maximizing the well-being of an individual and that of the group. Here…

Spatial ecological networks are widely used to model interactions between georeferenced biological entities (e.g., populations or communities). The analysis of such data often leads to a two-step approach where groups containing similar…

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…

In order to model real ecological systems one has to consider many species that interact in complex ways. However, most of the recent theoretical studies have been restricted to few species systems with rather trivial interactions. The few…

Tree-based models are increasingly popular due to their ability to identify complex relationships that are beyond the scope of parametric models. Survival tree methods adapt these models to allow for the analysis of censored outcomes, which…

For two resource-sharing species we explore the interplay of harvesting and dispersal strategies, as well as their influence on competition outcomes. Although the extinction of either species can be achieved by excessive culling, choosing a…