Related papers: Response to comment on Mutualism weaken the latitu…
In island biogeography, it is widely accepted that species richness on island depends on the area and isolation of the island as well as the species pool on the mainland. Delavaux et al. (2024) suggest that species richness on oceanic…
A recent paper by James et al. finds that mutualistic interactions decrease the biodiversity of model ecosystems. However, this result can be reverted if we consider ecological trade-offs and choose parameters suitable for sparse…
Researchers in social science and psychology have recently proposed using large language models (LLMs) as replacements for humans in behavioral research. In addition to arguments about whether LLMs accurately capture population-level…
Mutualistic interactions benefit both partners, promoting coexistence and genetic diversity. Spatial structure can promote cooperation, but spatial expansions may also make it hard for mutualistic partners to stay together, since genetic…
Relations among species in ecosystems can be represented by complex networks where both negative (competition) and positive (mutualism) interactions are concurrently present. Recently, it has been shown that many ecosystems can be cast into…
Rapoport's rule claims that latitudinal ranges of plant and animal species are generally smaller at low than at high latitudes. However, doubts as to the generality of the rule have been expressed, because studies providing evidence against…
The commonly observed negative correlation between the number of species in an ecological community and disease risk, typically referred to as "the dilution effect", has received a substantial amount of attention over the past decade.…
The relative importance of Lagrangian and population dynamics on spatial pattern formation in the distribution of plankton near the ocean's surface is investigated. Phytoplankton and zooplankton are treated as biologically interacting…
Island endemism is shaped by complex interactions among environmental, ecological, and evolutionary factors, yet the relative contributions of topography, climate, and land cover remain incompletely quantified. We investigated the drivers…
A neutral ecology model is simulated on an island chain, in which neighbouring islands can exchange individuals but only the first island is able to receive immigrants from a metacommunity. It is found by several measures that biodiversity…
Shape variability represents an important direct response of organisms to selective environments. Here, we use a combination of geometric morphometrics and generalised additive mixed models (GAMMs) to identify spatial patterns of natural…
Human-made structures are increasingly found in marine coastal habitats. The aim of the present study was to explore whether urban coastal structures can affect the genetic variation of hard-bottom species. We conducted a population genetic…
Ecological interactions among phytoplankton occur in a moving fluid environment. Oceanic flows can modulate the competition and coexistence between phytoplankton populations, which in turn can affect ecosystem function and biogeochemical…
Difficulties identifying appropriate biodiversity impact metrics remain a major barrier to inclusion of biodiversity considerations in environmentally responsible investment. We propose and analyse a simple science-based local metric: the…
The Leinster and Cobbold diversity index possesses a number of merits; in particular, it generalises many existing indices and defines an effective number. We present a scheme to quantify the contribution of richness, evenness, and…
It has been experimentally observed that distributed implementations of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms exhibit speedup saturation and decaying generalization ability beyond a particular batch-size. In this work, we…
Genetic drift at the frontiers of two-dimensional range expansions of microorganisms can frustrate local cooperation between different genetic variants, demixing the population into distinct sectors. In a biological context, mutualistic or…
The soil seed bank is a major component of plant communities. However, long-term analyses of the dynamics of the seed bank and the ensuing vegetation are rare. Here, we studied the dynamics in plant communities with high dominance of…
Global species richness is a key biodiversity metric. Despite recent efforts to estimate global species richness, the resulting estimates have been highly uncertain and often logically inconsistent. Estimates lower down either the taxonomic…
One of the central questions of metacommunity theory is how dispersal of organisms affects species diversity. Here we show that the diversity-dispersal relationship should not be studied in isolation of other abiotic and biotic flows in the…