119 Result(s)
-
Article
Open AccessTop-down and bottom-up coupling effects of subsidies on recipient ecosystems
A subsidy can directly enter a recipient ecosystem by either being consumed or being recycled to the nutrient pool with both pathways causing multiple indirect and potentially conflicting effects. Subsidy path...
-
Article
Open AccessEquilibrium population dynamics of site-dependent species
Adults of site-dependent species require a discrete structure, e.g., a cavity, for breeding, which they are unable to construct and must locate and occupy. The environment provides only a limited number of suc...
-
Article
Open AccessFood-web complexity, consumer behavior, and diet specialism: impacts on ecosystem stability
Ecological stability is a fundamental aspect of food web dynamics. In this study, we explore the factors influencing stability in complex ecological networks, characterizing it through biomass oscillations and...
-
Article
Open AccessAdaptation through organism-induced environmental transformations—a systems representation
Environments affect phenotypes through two elementary functions: modifying (by affecting the development of individuals’ phenotypes) and adaptive (by determining the phenotypes’ adaptive significance). Adaptat...
-
Article
Open AccessThe biological crop** hypothesis over evolutionary time: an experimental test
Ecological disturbance has been proposed to have a variety of effects on biodiversity. These mechanisms are well studied over shorter timescales through experimental manipulation of ecosystems, but the effect ...
-
Article
Open AccessRate-induced tip** can trigger plankton blooms
Plankton blooms are complex nonlinear phenomena whose occurrence can be described by the two-timescale (fast-slow) phytoplankton-zooplankton model introduced by Truscott and Brindley (Bulletin of Mathematical Bio...
-
Article
Open AccessTransient dynamics mask the resilience of coral reefs
Coral reefs are model systems for studies of ecological resilience, with communities generally exhibiting multiple stable states and more resilient regions trending towards a single, coral-dominated, regime. W...
-
Article
Open AccessAn energetic approach to the evolution of growth curve plasticity
Growth in individual body size amongst different species can to a greater or lesser extent depend on environmental factors such as resource availability. Individual growth curves can therefore be largely fixed...
-
Article
Open AccessQuantifying the effects of sensory stress on trophic cascades
Predators mediate the strength of trophic cascades indirectly by decreasing the number of prey consuming a basal resource and by altering prey responses that dictate prey foraging. The strength of these indire...
-
Article
Open AccessPreferential cannibalism as a key stabilizing mechanism of intraguild predation systems with trophic polymorphic predators
Theory predicts intraguild predation (IGP) to be unstable despite its ubiquity in nature, prompting exploration of stabilizing mechanisms of IGP. One of the many ways IGP manifests is through inducible trophic...
-
Article
Open AccessLocal interactions affect spread of resource in a consumer-resource system with group defense
Integrodifference equations are a discrete-time spatially explicit model that describes the dispersal of ecological populations through space. This framework is useful to study spread dynamics of organisms and...
-
Article
Open AccessUniversal ontogenetic growth without fitted parameters: implications for life history invariants and population growth
Since the work of von Bertalanffy (Q Rev Boil 32:217–231, 1957), several models have been proposed that relate the ontogenetic scaling of energy assimilation and metabolism to growth, which are able to describe o...
-
Article
Open AccessSpeciation in a MacArthur model predicts growth, stability, and adaptation in ecosystem dynamics
Ecosystem dynamics is often considered driven by a coupling of species’ resource consumption and its population size dynamics. Such resource-population dynamics is captured by MacArthur-type models. One biolog...
-
Article
Open AccessAn assessment of the contact rates between individuals when movement is modelled by a correlated random walk
Understanding how individuals come into contact with each other is important in many fields from biology and ecology to robotics and physics. Interaction dynamics are central in understanding how information i...
-
Article
Open AccessAlgal blooms as a reactive dynamic response to seasonal perturbation in an experimental system
Algal blooms are typical of many aquatic freshwater ecosystems in seasonal environments. Such blooms could derive from transient reactive dynamics of algae and limiting nutrients following seasonal perturbatio...
-
Article
Open AccessCoexistence in spatiotemporally fluctuating environments
Ecologists have put forward many explanations for coexistence, but these are only partial explanations; nature is complex, so it is reasonable to assume that in any given ecological community, multiple mechanisms...
-
Article
Open AccessFunctional diversity increases the resistance of a tritrophic food web to environmental changes
In the light of global climate change and biodiversity loss, understanding the role of functional diversity in the response of food webs to environmental change is growing ever more important. Using a tritroph...
-
Article
Open AccessThe effect of non-linear competitive interactions on quantifying niche and fitness differences
The niche and fitness differences of modern coexistence theory separate mechanisms into stabilizing and equalizing components. Although this decomposition can help us predict and understand species coexistence...
-
Article
Open AccessComments on: “Every variance function ... can be produced by any location-scale family ...”
-
Article
Open AccessComplex ecological communities and the emergence of island species-area relationships
It has been a century since the species-area relationship (SAR) was first proposed as a power law to explain how species richness scales with area. There have been many attempts to explain the origin of this p...
