Related papers: Reconstructing ecological community dynamics from …

We develop a landscape-flux framework to investigate observed frequency distributions of vegetation and the stability of these ecological systems under fluctuations. The frequency distributions can characterize the population-potential…

Detecting the time evolution of the community structure of networks is crucial to identify major changes in the internal organization of many complex systems, which may undergo important endogenous or exogenous events. This analysis can be…

Main aim of this topical issue is to report recent advances in noisy nonequilibrium processes useful to describe the dynamics of ecological systems and to address the mechanisms of spatio-temporal pattern formation in ecology both from the…

In nonlinear dynamical systems, tipping refers to a critical transition from one steady state to another, typically catastrophic, steady state, often resulting from a saddle-node bifurcation. Recently, the machine-learning framework of…

Populations are made up of an integer number of individuals and are subject to stochastic birth-death processes whose rates may vary in time. Useful quantities, like the chance of ultimate fixation, satisfy an appropriate difference…

The survival of natural populations may be greatly affected by environmental conditions that vary in space and time. We look at a population residing in two locations (patches) coupled by migration, in which the local conditions fluctuate…

The evolution of many dynamical systems that describe relationships or interactions between objects can be effectively modeled by temporal networks, which are typically represented as a sequence of static network snapshots. In this paper,…

We analyze a general theory for coexistence and extinction of ecological communities that are influenced by stochastic temporal environmental fluctuations. The results apply to discrete time (stochastic difference equations), continuous…

Tipping elements in the Earth System receive increased scientific attention over the recent years due to their nonlinear behavior and the risks of abrupt state changes. While being stable over a large range of parameters, a tipping element…

System-environment interactions are intrinsically nonlinear and dependent on the interplay between many degrees of freedom. The complexity may be even more pronounced when one aims to describe biologically motivated systems. In that case,…

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…

Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…

Switching dynamical systems provide a powerful, interpretable modeling framework for inference in time-series data in, e.g., the natural sciences or engineering applications. Since many areas, such as biology or discrete-event systems, are…

Bayesian methods are increasingly being applied to parameterize mechanistic process models used in environmental prediction and forecasting. In particular, models describing ecosystem dynamics with multiple states that are linear and…

Over the last few decades, climate scientists have devoted much effort to the development of large numerical models of the atmosphere and the ocean. While there is no question that such models provide important and useful information on…

Water availability is a major environmental driver affecting riparian and wetland vegetation. The interaction between water table fluctuations and vegetation in a stochastic environment contributes to the complexity of the dynamics of these…

1. An understanding of how biodiversity confers ecosystem stability is crucial in managing ecosystems under major environmental changes. Multiple biodiversity drivers can stabilize ecosystem functions over time. However, we know little…

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…

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…

Increasing pressures on the environment are generating an ever-increasing need to manage animal and plant populations sustainably, and to protect and rebuild endangered populations. Effective management requires reliable mathematical…