Related papers: On the origin of plankton patchiness
Empirical observations in marine ecosystems have suggested a balance of biological and advection time scales as a possible explanation of species coexistence. To characterise this scenario, we measure the time to fixation in neutrally…
Dispersal of species to find a more favorable habitat is important in population dynamics. Dispersal rates evolve in response to the relative success of different dispersal strategies. In a simplified deterministic treatment (J. Dockery, V.…
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…
Mass extinction is a phenomenon in the history of life on Earth when a considerable number of species go extinct over a relatively short period of time. The magnitude of extinction varies between the events, the most well known are the…
In this brief report we discuss how continuous changes on the physical parameters that determine the weather conditions may lead to long term climate variability. This variability of the weather patterns are a response to continuous random…
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…
Decline of the dissolved oxygen in the ocean is a growing concern, as it may eventually lead to global anoxia, an elevated mortality of marine fauna and even a mass extinction. Deoxygenation of the ocean often results in the formation of…
When can complex ecological interactions drive an entire ecosystem into a persistent non-equilibrium state, where species abundances keep fluctuating without going to extinction? We show that high-diversity spatially-extended systems, in…
Human settlements on Earth are scattered in a multitude of shapes, sizes and spatial arrangements. These patterns are often not random but a result of complex geographical, cultural, economic and historical processes that have profound…
The impact of environmental fluctuation on species diversity is studied with a model of the evolutionary ecology of microorganisms. We show that environmental fluctuation induces evolutionary branching and assures the consequential…
Spatial patterns are widely observed in numerous nonequilibrium natural systems, often undergoing complex transitions and bifurcations, thereby exhibiting significant importance in many physical and biological systems such as embryonic…
Due to the conventional distinction between ecological (rapid) and evolutionary (slow)timescales, ecological and population models to date have typically ignored the effects of evolution. Yet the potential for rapid evolutionary change has…
A great number of biological organisms live in aqueous environments. Major evolutionary transitions, including the emergence of life itself, likely occurred in such environments. While the chemical aspects of the role of water in biology…
Sea urchin feeding fronts are a striking example of spatial pattern formation in an ecological system. If it is assumed that urchins are asocial, and that they move randomly, then the formation of these dense fronts is an apparent paradox.…
Monitoring the evolution of the anthropogenic light emissions is a priority task in light pollution research. Among the complementary approaches that can be adopted to achieve this goal stand out those based on measuring the direct radiance…
Water availability is a major environmental driver affecting riparian and wetland vegetation. The interaction between water table fluctuations and vegetation in a stochastic environment contributes to the complexity of the dynamics of these…
Precipitation is one of the most important meteorological variables for defining the climate dynamics, but the spatial patterns of precipitation have not been fully investigated yet. The complex network theory, which provides a robust tool…
The motility of microorganisms is often biased by gradients in physical and chemical properties of their environment, with myriad implications on their ecology. Here we show that fluid acceleration reorients gyrotactic plankton, triggering…
Plankton are small drifting organisms found throughout the world's oceans and can be indicators of ocean health. One component of this plankton community is the zooplankton, which includes gelatinous animals and crustaceans (e.g. shrimp),…
One of the properties that make ecological systems so unique is the range of complex behavioural patterns that can be exhibited by even the simplest communities with only a few species. Much of this complexity is commonly attributed to…