Related papers: Statistical mechanics unifies different ecological…
The abundance of a species' population in an ecosystem is rarely stationary, often exhibiting large fluctuations over time. Using historical data on marine species, we show that the year-to-year fluctuations of population growth rate obey a…
The Maximum Entropy Modeling Toolkit supports parameter estimation and prediction for statistical language models in the maximum entropy framework. The maximum entropy framework provides a constructive method for obtaining the unique…
The maximum entropy principle (MEP) apparently allows us to derive, or justify, fundamental results of equilibrium statistical mechanics. Because of this, a school of thought considers the MEP as a powerful and elegant way to make…
Recent work in data mining and related areas has highlighted the importance of the statistical assessment of data mining results. Crucial to this endeavour is the choice of a non-trivial null model for the data, to which the found patterns…
WhyWhere is a new ecological niche modeling (ENM) algorithm for mapping and explaining the distribution of species. The algorithm uses image processing methods to efficiently sift through large amounts of data to find the few variables that…
A thermodynamic device placed outdoors, or a local ecosystem, is subject to a variety of different temperatures given by short-tem (daily) and long-term (seasonal) variations. In the long term a superstatistical description makes sense,…
Adaptive systems -- such as a biological organism gaining survival advantage, an autonomous robot executing a functional task, or a motor protein transporting intracellular nutrients -- must model the regularities and stochasticity in their…
We propose a model of multispecies populations surviving on distributed resources. System dynamics are investigated under changes in abiotic factors such as the climate, as parameterized through environmental temperature. In particular, we…
Statistical physics aims to describe properties of macroscale systems in terms of distributions of their microscale agents. Its central tool is the maximization of entropy, a variational principle. We review the history of this principle,…
Modern ecology has re-emphasized the need for a quantitative understanding of the original 'survival of the fittest theme' based on analyzis of the intricate trade-offs between competing evolutionary strategies that characterize the…
Ecosystems dynamics is often considered as driven by a coupling of species' resource consumption and its population size dynamics. Such resource-population dynamics is captured by MacArthur-type models. One biologically relevant feature…
The potential effects of conservation actions on threatened species can be predicted using ensemble ecosystem models by forecasting populations with and without intervention. These model ensembles commonly assume stable coexistence of…
Over the last few decades, ecologists have come to appreciate that key ecological patterns, which describe ecological communities at relatively large spatial scales, are not only scale dependent, but also intimately intertwined. The…
We investigate the thermodynamics as well as the population dynamics of ecosystems based on a stochastic approach in which the number of individuals of the several species of the ecosystem are treated as stochastic variables. The several…
Despite the general acknowledgment of the role of niche and fitness differences in community dynamics, species abundance has been coined as a relevant feature not just regarding niche perspectives, but also according to neutral…
The design of fair and efficient algorithms for allocating public resources, such as school admissions, housing, or medical residency, has a profound social impact. In one-sided matching problems, where individuals are assigned to items…
Random matrix theory successfully connects the structure of interactions of large ecological communities to their ability to respond to perturbations. One of the most debated aspects of this approach is the missing role of population…
We present an explicit unified stochastic model of fluctuations in population size due to random birth, death, density-dependent competition and environmental fluctuations. Stochastic dynamics provide insight into small populations,…
The framework of optimal transport has been leveraged to extend the notion of rank to the multivariate setting while preserving desirable properties of the resulting goodness-of-fit (GoF) statistics. In particular, the rank energy (RE) and…
Ecosystems are governed by dynamic processes such as competition for resources, reproduction and dispersal. These shape their biodiversity and how the system responds to change. Current approaches to modelling ecosystems, especially plants,…