Dispersal is a key mechanism shaping observed ecological and evolutionary processes. Owing to its inherent costs, dispersal incur trade-offs with many life-history traits. Here we propose and investigate a metapopulation model that follows an extinction-colonization dynamics. The problem is investigated within an evolutionary perspective in which individuals are constrained by a trade-off relationship

Global warming is a major threat to the natural environment worldwide with potential adverse impact on plankton community. This will ultimately lead to a change in the dynamics of aquatic food webs. In this study we used seasonally forced multi-species version of the classic Rosenzweig–MacArthur predator–prey model to understand the role and stochastic influence of increasing temperature on marine

Chemical Organization Theory (COT) has been successfully applied to analyze complex reaction networks where species interact and new species can emerge. The COT has been well studied, but is yet to analyze high dimensional systems dynamics over time equivalent to ordinary differential equations. Moreover, spatial effects, such as diffusion and boundary conditions have also not been considered yet.

The spread of SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) is here investigated from an epidemic model considering four pathways of person-to-person transmission. These pathways represent the propagation of this novel coronavirus by asymptomatic and symptomatic infected individuals. In this work, analytical expressions for the disease-free and endemic steady-states are derived. Also

We model bioeconomic interrelations between a commercial fishery and an aquaculture industry by using a dynamical systems theory approach. The biomass follows a logistic growth where the pollution emerging from aquaculture is accounted for by means of a retardation term. We investigate the existence and stability of the equilibrium states of this model as a function of the growth-retardation parameter

We consider a tritrophic system with one basal and one top species and a large number of primary consumers, and derive upper and lower bounds for the total biomass of the middle trophic level. These estimates do not depend on dynamical regime, holding for fixed point, periodic, or chaotic dynamics. We have two kinds of estimates, depending on whether the predator abundance is zero. All these results

Climate change is uncertain and has uncertain effects on the suitabilities of species habitats. Conservation strategies have to take this uncertainty into account. Two concepts for addressing uncertainty are, to make strategies adaptive and robust. Using a stylized ecological-economic model in which a decision maker can allocate a conservation budget between two time periods and two regions, I explore

The study of change in land use has been recently included in territorial planning in order to inform spatial planners and policy makers of the possible future developments and therefore optimize their management decisions. Several models have been proposed to simulate land use change. These models are used to understand and analyze the previous change in order to explore the future evolutions. In

An applied ecological approach was used to assess the anthropogenic disturbances on the aquatic systems of the Sorocaba river and its wetlands in the Sorocaba-SP municipality (Southeastern Brazil). Two samplings of water, sediment, macroinvertebrates, and macrophytes were performed in 2017, during the rainy season (February) and dry season (June). Traditional limnological methods were applied to the

Peary caribou (Rangifer tarandus pearyi) is listed as Endangered under Canada's Species at Risk Act. Studying rare and endangered species can be particularly challenging due to the constraints posed by incomplete datasets owing to poor weather conditions, lack of technology, organizational deficiencies, and high survey costs in remote areas. A defensible way to remedy data gaps and thus improve the

We propose an innovative mathematical model for studying the dynamics of a complex network of forest ecosystems, in which two forest patches interact which each other through water exchanges. Our model reproduces a recently analyzed principle of constant precipitation quantity over densely forested areas. We perform a stability and bifurcation analysis and show that the distance separating two forest

We consider a reaction-diffusion(-taxis) predator-prey system with group defense in the prey. Taxis-driven instability can occur if the group defense influences the taxis rate (Wang et al., 2017). We elaborate that this mechanism is indeed possible but biologically unlikely to be responsible for pattern formation in such a system. Conversely, we show that patterns in excitable media such as spatiotemporal

In communication animals use a full range of signals: acoustic, visual, chemical, electrical and tactile. The processes involved in how and why animals communicate have long held veritable fascination for scientists. A branch of science concerned with the production of sound and its effects on living organisms is bioacoustics. The main purpose of the present study is to raise and discuss some issues

Does the adoption of environment-oriented actions by individuals necessarily improve the state of an ecosystem in the most effective way? We address this question with the example of eutrophication in shallow lakes. When exposed to fertilizers, such lakes can undergo a critical transition called eutrophication, resulting in a loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. We couple a generic model of

Scale dependence is one of the major characteristics of landscape. Urban landscape is highly affected by human activities with a multi-scale structure, which makes the multi-scale identification of urban structure an obligation for urban spatial studies. Although there have been many previous studies on urban landscape structure, most of them have been conducted on a single scale, and the multi-scale

The unique vegetation of rupestrian grassland (Campo Rupestre) is finely tuned to the strong environmental and edaphoclimatic filters that resulted in important adaptations and high levels of endemism. In this study, we intend to give another focus to the understanding of the identity of the rupestrian grasslands by observing their floristic relationships with other surrounding vegetation types and

Patterned vegetation is a characteristic feature of many dryland ecosystems. While plant densities on the ecosystem-wide scale are typically low, a spatial self-organisation principle leads to the occurrence of alternating patches of high biomass and patches of bare soil. Nevertheless, intraspecific competition dynamics other than competition for water over long spatial scales are commonly ignored

Self-organization is a process where order of a whole system arises out of local interactions between small components of a system. Emergy, spelled with an ‘m’, defined as the amount of (solar) energy used to make a product or service, is becoming an important ecological indicator. The Maximum Empower Principle (MEP) was proposed as the fourth law of thermodynamics by the ecologist Odum in the90′s

In this paper, we propose a general ratio-dependent prey-predator model with disease in predator subject to the strong Allee effect in prey. We obtain the complete dynamics of both models: (a) full model with Allee effect; (b) full model without Allee effect. Model (a) may have more than one interior equilibrium point, but model (b) has only one interior equilibrium point. Numerical results reveal

This paper investigates a series of harvesting problems of a harvested predator-prey system with Holling type IV functional response. The bionomic equilibrium, the maximum sustainable total yield (MSTY) and the optimal economic profit of the proposed system are studied. It is proved that the MSTY does not exist under the independent harvesting mode, while it may be found with the same predator and

Classic population models can often predict the dynamics of biological populations in nature. However, the adaptation process and learning mechanism of species are rarely considered in the study of population dynamics, due to the complex interaction of species, seasonal variation, spatial distribution or other factors. We use reinforcement learning algorithms to improve the existing individual-based

The margins within the geographic range of species are often specific in terms of ecological and evolutionary processes, and can strongly influence the species’ reaction to climate change. One of the frequently observed features at range margins is fragmentation, caused internally by population dynamics or externally by the limited availability of suitable habitat sites. We study both causes, and describe

Several field data and experiments on a terrestrial vertebrates exhibited that the fear of predators would cause a substantial variability of prey demography. Fear for predator population enhances the survival probability of prey population, and it can greatly reduce the reproduction of prey population. Based on the experimental evidence, we proposed and analyzed a prey-predator system introducing

Biome boundaries are expected to be sensitive to changes in climate and disturbance, because it is here that ecological communities are at environmental, ecological or disturbance limits. Using palaeoecology to study ecosystem dynamics at biome boundaries provides opportunities for understanding ecosystem resilience or sensitivity at ecologically meaningful timescales, and under varying climatic and

Evolutionary games usually take into consideration individuals’ strategies as the transformative characteristic which leads to the evolution of the population. Here, besides the strategies, interaction aspects are also considered as evolutionary attributes which can change over time as the replacement dynamic renovates the population choosing locally better individuals to reproduce. The population