Related papers: Ecological modelling of hycean worlds
The concept of the Circumstellar Habitable Zone has served the scientific community well for some decades. It slips easily off the tongue, and it would be hard to replace. Recently, however, several workers have postulated types of…
Habitability has been generally defined as the capability of an environment to support life. Ecologists have been using Habitat Suitability Models (HSMs) for more than four decades to study the habitability of Earth from local to global…
Species coexistence is a complex, multifaceted problem. At an equilibrium, coexistence requires two conditions: stability under small perturbations; and feasibility, meaning all species abundances are positive. Which of these two conditions…
Implicit in the definition of the classical circumstellar habitable zone (HZ) is the hypothesis that the carbonate-silicate cycle can maintain clement climates on exoplanets with land and surface water across a range of instellations by…
The ability of a planet to maintain surface water, key to life as we know it, depends on solar and planetary energy. As a star ages, it delivers more energy to a planet. As a planet ages it produces less internal heat, which leads to…
With thousands of exoplanets now identified, the characterization of habitable planets and the potential identification of inhabited ones is a major challenge for the coming decades. We review the current working definition of habitable…
Habitability is usually defined as the requirement for a terrestrial planet's atmosphere to sustain liquid water. This definition can be complemented by the dynamical requirement that other planets in the system do not gravitationally…
We present properties of Lotka-Volterra equations describing ecological competition among a large number of competing species. First we extend to the case of a non-homogeneous niche space stability conditions for solutions representing…
Understanding planetary habitability requires a comparative approach that explores the divergent evolutionary outcomes of Earth and Venus. The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) will be uniquely positioned to conduct a statistical and…
Terrestrial exoplanets in the canonical habitable zone may have a variety of initial water fractions due to random volatile delivery by planetesimals. If the total planetary water complement is high, the entire surface may be covered in…
The search for life beyond the solar system is a central goal in exoplanetary science. Exoplanet surveys are increasingly detecting potentially habitable exoplanets and large telescopes in space and on ground are aiming to detect possible…
Species-rich communities, such as the microbiota or microbial ecosystems, provide key functions for human health and climatic resilience. Increasing effort is being dedicated to design experimental protocols for selecting community-level…
Explaining the emergence of self-organized biodiversity and species abundance distribution patterns remians a fundamental challenge in ecology. While classical frameworks, such as neutral theory and models based on pairwise species…
The unexpected diversity of exoplanets includes a growing number of super- Earth planets, i.e., exoplanets with masses of up to several Earth masses and a similar chemical and mineralogical composition as Earth. We present a thermal…
In an effort to derive temperature based criteria of habitability for multicellular life, we investigated the thermal limits of terrestrial poikilotherms, i.e. organisms whose body temperature and the functioning of all vital processes is…
A recent observation of the exoplanet K2-18b sparked interest among scientists - large amounts of carbon dioxide and methane were detected in an H2-rich background atmosphere. If the planet is a hycean world (liquid water ocean +…
The future biosphere on Earth (as with its past) will be made up predominantly of unicellular microorganisms. Unicellular life was probably present for at least 2.5 Gyr before multicellular life appeared and will likely be the only form of…
There are two dominant and contrasting classes of origin of life scenarios: those predicting that life emerged in submarine hydrothermal systems, where chemical disequilibrium can provide an energy source for nascent life; and those…
The random Lotka-Volterra model is widely used to describe the dynamical and thermodynamic features of ecological communities. In this work, we consider random symmetric interactions between species and analyze the strongly competitive…
Recently, computational modelling became a very important research tool that enables us to study problems that for decades evaded scientific analysis. Evolutionary systems are certainly examples of such problems: they are composed of many…