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Despite the common misconception of nearly static organisms, plants do interact continuously with the environment and with each other. It is fair to assume that during their evolution they developed particular features to overcome problems…
We analyse the statistical properties of genealogical trees in a neutral model of a closed population with sexual reproduction and non-overlapping generations. By reconstructing the genealogy of an individual from the population evolution,…
The wealth of data being gathered about humans and their surroundings drives new machine learning applications in various fields. Consequently, more and more often, classifiers are trained using not only numerical data but also complex data…
A taxonomy is a standardized framework to classify and organize items into categories. Hierarchical taxonomies are ubiquitous, ranging from the classification of organisms to the file system on a computer. Characterizing the typical…
One of the first beings affected by changes in the climate are trees, one of our most vital resources. In this study tree species interaction and the response to climate in different ecological environments is observed by applying a joint…
We present new theoretical and empirical results on the probability distributions of species persistence times in natural ecosystems. Persistence times, defined as the timespans occurring between species' colonization and local extinction…
Several theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explain observed biodiversity patterns, ranging from the classical niche-based theories, mainly employing a continuous formalism, to neutral theories, based on statistical mechanics of…
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 maintenance of diversity, the `commonness of rarity', and compositional turnover are ubiquitous features of species-rich communities. Through a minimal model, we consider how these features reflect the interplay between environmental…
Understanding the patterns and processes of diversification of life in the planet is a key challenge of science. The Tree of Life represents such diversification processes through the evolutionary relationships among the different taxa, and…
Automatic identification of plant specimens from amateur photographs could improve species range maps, thus supporting ecosystems research as well as conservation efforts. However, classifying plant specimens based on image data alone is…
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…
Genomic data are rapidly resolving the tree of living species calibrated to time, the timetree of life, which will provide a framework for research in diverse fields of science. Previous analyses of taxonomically restricted timetrees have…
We consider populations structured by a phenotypic trait and a space variable, in a non-homogeneous environment. In the case of sex- ual populations, we are able to derive models close to existing mod- els in theoretical biology, from a…
Repetitions within a given genealogical tree provides some information about the degree of consanguineity of a population. They can be analyzed with techniques usually employed in statistical physics when dealing with fixed point…
In ecology, the description of species composition and biodiversity calls for statistical methods that involve estimating features of interest in unobserved samples based on an observed one. In the last decade, the Bayesian nonparametrics…
With advances in sequencing technologies, there are now massive amounts of genomic data from across all life, leading to the possibility that a robust Tree of Life can be constructed. However, "gene tree heterogeneity", which is when…
The reconstruction of a central tendency `species tree' from a large number of conflicting gene trees is a central problem in systematic biology. Moreover, it becomes particularly problematic when taxon coverage is patchy, so that not all…
Predicting species persistence within ecological communities is a fundamental challenge for both empirical and theoretical ecology. Existing methods span from mechanistic models, whose parameters are difficult to estimate from data, to…
Phenological timing -- i.e. the course of annually recurring development stages in nature -- is of particular interest since it can be understood as a proxy for the climate at a specific region; moreover changes in the so called…