Related papers: Biological barriers to forest pest invasions: A no…

We study the phenomenon of multistability in mutualistic networks of plants and pollinators, where one desired state in which all species coexist competes with multiple states in which some species are gone extinct. In this setting, we…

Certain invasive plants may rely on interference mechanisms (allelopathy, e.g.) to gain competitive superiority over native species. But expending resources on interference presumably exacts a cost in another life-history trait, so that the…

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…

Global environmental change is affecting species distribution and their interactions with other species. In particular, the main drivers of environmental change strongly affect the strength of interspecific interactions with considerable…

An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…

Motivated by questions in social networks, distributed computing and probabilistic combinatorics, the last few years have seen increasing interest in network evolution models where new vertices entering the system need to make decisions…

Males are often the "sicker" sex with male biased parasitism found in a taxonomically diverse range of species. There is considerable interest in the processes that could underlie the evolution of sex-biased parasitism. Mating system…

Random walks have been proposed as a simple method of efficiently searching, or disseminating information throughout, communication and sensor networks. In nature, animals (such as ants) tend to follow correlated random walks, i.e., random…

Bark beetle outbreaks can dramatically impact forest ecosystems and services around the world. For the development of effective forest policies and management plans, the early detection of infested trees is essential. Despite the visual…

In this work we consider the first encounter problems between a fixed and/or mobile target A and a moving trap B on Bethe Lattices and Cayley trees. The survival probability (SP) of the target A on the both kinds of structures are analyzed…

Spatial extent is a complicating factor in mathematical biology. The possibility that an action at point A cannot immediately affect what happens at point B creates the opportunity for spatial nonuniformity. This nonuniformity must change…

Rapidly expanding insect populations, deforestation, and global climate change threaten to destabilize key planetary carbon pools, especially the Earth's forests which link the micro-ecology of insect infestation to climate. To the extent…

Random forests are a very effective and commonly used statistical method, but their full theoretical analysis is still an open problem. As a first step, simplified models such as purely random forests have been introduced, in order to shed…

Habitat fragmentation, often driven by human activities, alters ecological landscapes by disrupting connectivity and reshaping species interactions. In such fragmented environments, habitats can be modeled as networks, where individuals…

Classical models of biological invasions assess species spread in homogeneous landscapes by assuming constant growth rates and random local movement. Mounting evidence suggests, however, that demographic stochasticity, environmental…

Environmental heterogeneity can drive genetic heterogeneity in expanding populations; mutant strains may emerge that trade overall growth rate for an improved ability to survive in patches that are hostile to the wild type. This…

Internet worm infection continues to be one of top security threats and has been widely used by botnets to recruit new bots. In this work, we attempt to quantify the infection ability of individual hosts and reveal the key characteristics…

Species introductions to new habitats can cause a decline in the population size of competing native species and consequently also in their genetic diversity. We are interested in why these adverse effects are weak in some cases whereas in…

We investigate the dynamics of a simple epidemiological model for the invasion by a pathogen strain of a population where another strain circulates. We assume that reinfection by the same strain is possible but occurs at a reduced rate due…

Ticks are important vectors of emerging zoonotic diseases. While adults of many tick species parasitize mammals, immature ticks are often found on wild birds. In the tropics, difficulties in species-level identification of immature ticks…