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Biodiversity loss driven by agricultural intensification is a pressing global issue, with significant implications for ecosystem stability and human well-being. Existing policy instruments have so far proven insufficient in halting this…
Species coexistence is one of the central themes in modern ecology. Coexistence is a prerequisite of biological diversity. However, the question arises how biodiversity can be reconciled with the statement of competition theory, which…
Why, contrary to theoretical predictions, do marine microbe communities harbor tremendous phenotypic heterogeneity? How can so many marine microbe species competing in the same niche coexist? We discovered a unifying explanation for both…
Niche and neutral theory are two prevailing, yet much debated, ideas in ecology proposed to explain the patterns of biodiversity. Whereas niche theory emphasizes selective differences between species and interspecific interactions in…
In a complex system, the individual components are neither so tightly coupled or correlated that they can all be treated as a single unit, nor so uncorrelated that they can be approximated as independent entities. Instead, patterns of…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
Neutral models for the dynamics of a system of competing species are used, nowadays, to describe a wide variety of empirical communities. These models are used in many situations, ranging from population genetics and ecological biodiversity…
Neutral models, in which individual agents with equal fitness undergo a birth-death-mutation process, are very popular in population genetics and community ecology. Usually these models are applied to populations and communities with…
We derive an analytical approximation for making quantitative predictions for ecological communities as a function of the mean intensity of the inter-specific competition and the species richness. This method, with only a fraction of the…
The quantity and types of biodiversity data being collected have increased in recent years. If we are to model and monitor biodiversity effectively, we need to respect how different data sets were collected, and effectively integrate these…
The increasing volume of ecologically and biologically relevant data has revealed a wide collection of emergent patterns in living systems. Analyzing different datasets, ranging from metabolic gene-regulatory to species interaction…
A novel mechanism for sympatric speciation that takes into account complex bio-processes within each individual organism is proposed. According to dynamical systems theory, organisms with identical genotypes can possess differentiated…
Hubbell's neutral theory of biodiversity has successfully explained the observed composition of many ecological communities but it relies on strict demographic equivalence among species and provides no room for evolutionary processes like…
Our research is concerned with studying behavioural changes within a dynamic system, i.e. health care, and their effects on the decision-making process. Evolutionary Game theory is applied to investigate the most probable strategy(ies)…
Measures of biodiversity change such as the Living Planet Index describe proportional change in the abundance of a typical species, which can be thought of as change in the size of a community. Here, I discuss the orthogonal concept of…
Diversification models describe the random growth of evolutionary trees, modeling the historical relationships of species through speciation and extinction events. One class of such models allows for independently changing traits, or types,…
Structure, composition and stability of ecological populations are shaped by the inter- and intra-species interactions within these communities. It remains to be fully understood how the interplay of these interactions with other factors,…
Species richness varies widely across the tree of life, and there is great interest in identifying ecological, geographic, and other factors that affect rates of species proliferation. Recent methods for explicitly modeling the…
The species-area relationship is one of the central generalizations in ecology however its origin has remained a puzzle. Since ecosystems are understood as energy transduction systems, the regularities in species richness are considered to…
Ecosystems display a complex spatial organization. Ecologists have long tried to characterize them by looking at how different measures of biodiversity change across spatial scales. Ecological neutral theory has provided simple predictions…