Related papers: Pan-tropical plant functional trait variation from…
Dispersal is a well recognized driver of ecological and evolutionary dynamics, and simultaneously an evolving trait. Dispersal evolution has traditionally been studied in single-species metapopulations so that it remains unclear how…
Phenology, the timing of cyclical plant life events such as leaf emergence and coloration, is crucial in the bio-climatic system. Climate change drives shifts in these phenological events, impacting ecosystems and the climate itself.…
Climate change affects occurrences of floods and droughts worldwide. However, predicting climate impacts over individual watersheds is difficult, primarily because accurate hydrological forecasts require models that are calibrated to past…
Mutations in a microbial population can increase the frequency of a genotype not only by increasing its exponential growth rate, but also by decreasing its lag time or adjusting the yield (resource efficiency). The contribution of multiple…
Ecological networks such as plant-pollinator systems and food webs vary in space and time. This variability includes fluctuations in global network properties such as total number and intensity of interactions but also in the local…
Although many phenotypic traits are determined by a large number of genetic variants, how a polygenic trait adapts in response to the changes in the environment is still poorly understood. Here we study the adaptation dynamics of a…
A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special conceptual challenges because of the strong mutual influences…
Random forests (RFs) are widely used for prediction and variable importance analysis and are often believed to capture any types of interactions via recursive splitting. However, since the splits are chosen locally, interactions are only…
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…
The process of desertification in the semi-arid climatic zone is considered by many as a catastrophic regime shift, since the positive feedback of vegetation density on growth rates yields a system that admits alternative steady states.…
Eco-evolutionary frameworks can explain certain features of communities in which ecological and evolutionary processes occur over comparable timescales. Here, we investigate whether an evolutionary dynamics may interact with the spatial…
An increasing number of studies have demonstrated correlations between climate trends and body size change of organisms. In many cases, climate might be expected to influence body size by altering thermoregulation, energetics or food…
Identifying undocumented or potential future interactions among species is a challenge facing modern ecologists. Recent link prediction methods rely on trait data, however large species interaction databases are typically sparse and…
Self-organized spatial patterns of vegetation are frequent in drylands and, because pattern shape correlates with water availability, they have been suggested as important indicators of ecosystem health. However, the mechanisms underlying…
Precise and reliable climate projections are required for climate adaptation and mitigation, but Earth system models still exhibit great uncertainties. Several approaches have been developed to reduce the spread of climate projections and…
Lateral transfer, a process whereby species exchange evolutionary traits through non-ancestral relationships, is a frequent source of model misspecification in phylogenetic inference. Lateral transfer obscures the phylogenetic signal in the…
Understanding the environmental drivers of forest transpiration is critical for improving global predictions of water availability and ecosystem health. Due to many competing controls on plant water stress and ecosystem transpiration,…
How do interactions between species influence their spatial distribution in an ecosystem? To answer this question, we introduce a spatially-extended ecosystem of Generalized Lotka-Volterra type, where species can diffuse and interactions…
Phylogenetic trees are the fundamental mathematical representation of evolutionary processes in biology. They are also objects of interest in pure mathematics, such as algebraic geometry and combinatorics, due to their discrete geometry.…
The USDA Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program conducts a national forest inventory for the United States through a network of permanent field plots. FIA produces estimates of area averages and totals for plot-measured forest…