Related papers: Pan-tropical plant functional trait variation from…
Across plant communities worldwide, fire regimes reflect a combination of climatic factors and plant characteristics. To shed new light on the complex relationships between plant characteristics and fire regimes, we developed a new…
Vegetation often understood merely as the result of long-term climate conditions. However, vegetation itself plays a fundamental role in shaping Earth's climate by regulating the energy, water, and biogeochemical cycles across terrestrial…
Natural ecosystems are characterized by striking diversity of form and functions and yet exhibit deep symmetries emerging across scales of space, time and organizational complexity. Species-area relationships and species-abundance…
Intraspecific trait variation has been increasingly recognized as an important factor in determining species interaction and diversity. Eco-evolutionary models have studied the distribution of trait values within a population that changes…
The coupling between evolutionary and ecological changes (eco-evolutionary dynamics) has been shown to be relevant among diverse species, and is also of interest outside of ecology, i.e. in cancer evolution. These dynamics play an important…
Thermal conditions in the urban canopy exhibit stochastic variability driven by varied radiative fluxes and turbulent wind fields, requiring probabilistic rather than deterministic prediction methods. This study presents a probabilistic…
The distributions of species lifetimes and species in space are related, since species with good local survival chances have more time to colonize new habitats and species inhabiting large areas have higher chances to survive local…
Post-genomic research deals with challenging problems in screening genomes of organisms for particular functions or potential for being the targets of genetic engineering for desirable biological features. 'Phenotyping' of wild type and…
Tree-grass coexistence is a defining feature of savanna ecosystems, which play an important role in supporting biodiversity and human populations worldwide. While recent advances have clarified many of the underlying processes, how these…
Ecologists have long suspected that species are more likely to interact if their traits match in a particular way. For example, a pollination interaction may be more likely if the proportions of a bee's tongue fit a plant's flower shape.…
Over the last few decades, ecologists have come to appreciate that key ecological patterns, which describe ecological communities at relatively large spatial scales, are not only scale dependent, but also intimately intertwined. The…
The rise of trait-based ecology has led to an increased focus on the distribution and dynamics of traits in communities. However, a general theory of trait-based ecology, that can apply across different scales (e.g., species that differ in…
Species' interactions are shaped by their traits. Thus, we expect traits -- in particular, trait (dis)similarity -- to play a central role in determining whether a particular set of species coexists. Traits are, in turn, the outcome of an…
Functional-structural plant models (FSPM) replicate plants' responses to their environment and are useful for predicting behavior in a changing climate. However, they rely on detailed measurements of traits, which are difficult to collect…
Mountain ecosystems are sensitive indicators of climate change. Long-term studies may be extremely useful in assessing the responses of high-elevation ecosystems to climate change and other anthropogenic drivers. Mountain research sites…
Inferring the processes underlying the emergence of observed patterns is a key challenge in theoretical ecology. Much effort has been made in the past decades to collect extensive and detailed information about the spatial distribution of…
We present an analytically tractable variant of the voter model that provides a quantitatively accurate description of beta-diversity (two-point correlation function) in two tropical forests. The model exhibits novel scaling behavior that…
Complex ecosystems generally consist of a large number of different species utilizing a large number of different resources. Several of their features cannot be captured by models comprising just a few species and resources. Recently,…
We analyze several florae (collections of plant species populating specific areas) in different geographic and climatic regions. For every list of species we produce a taxonomic classification tree and we consider its statistical…
High-throughput sequencing techniques such as metagenomic and metatranscriptomic technologies allow cataloging of functional characteristics of microbial community members as well as their taxonomic identity. Such studies have found that a…