Long-distance dispersal (LDD) has long been recognized as a key factor in determining rates of spread in biological invasions. Two approaches for incorporating LDD in mathematical models of spread are mixed dispersal and heavy-tailed dispersal. In this paper, I analyze integrodifference equation (IDE) models with mixed-dispersal kernels and fat-tailed (a subset of the heavy-tailed class) dispersal

Rapid evolution during range expansion is a key mechanism influencing species’ ability to colonize new habitat. Understanding how selective processes alter expansion speed is thus critical to predicting both the spread of invasive species and responses to climate change. Theory predicts evolution of increased dispersal and fecundity at the leading edge of expansions. However, these traits are often

The enhanced or reduced growth of juvenile masu salmon (Oncorhynchus masou masou) may result from climate changes to their environment and thus impact on the eco-evolutionary dynamics of their life-history choices. Male juveniles with status, i.e., if their body size is larger than a threshold, stay in the stream and become resident males reproducing for multiple years, while those with smaller status

We propose a stochastic model for interacting species in a metacommunity in order to study the factors affecting the intensity of the competition/colonization trade-off as a coexistence mechanism in metacommunities. We particularly focus on the role of the number of local communities and the number of refuges for the inferior competitor. The stochastic component is associated with the dispersal process

We develop a compartment model inspired by producer–herbivore–microbe soil food webs and determine how the naturally occurring seasonal variation in producer and detrital quality affects microbial nutrient cycling and the feedback to primary production. We show that seasonal changes in the stoichiometric quality of the producer coupled with the efficiency of herbivore grazing could induce a switch

Most animal species have a complex life cycle (CLC) with metamorphosis. It is thus of interest to examine possible benefits of such life histories. The prevailing view is that CLC represents an adaptation for genetic decoupling of juvenile and adult traits, thereby allowing life stages to respond independently to different selective forces. Here I propose an additional potential advantage of CLCs that

Drylands are ecosystems, where lack of rains imposes harsh conditions for the survival of organisms. These ecosystems are also susceptible to degradation and desertification. Their conservation depends on the understanding of the ecological functioning of vegetation and soil. In drylands, the vegetation is spatially structured as a mosaic of patches (vegetation) and interpatches (bare soil). This structure

Eco-evolutionary models commonly assume that traits are normally distributed in a population, and that the trait bounds do not influence the adaptation of traits. However, recent empirical evidence suggests that at least some traits are not normally distributed, and there is theoretical support for the view that trait bounds can be fundamental to trait adaptation. These attributes suggest that a beta

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. The 2nd affiliation of Sonia Kéfi was missing

The spatial arrangement of habitat patches in a metapopulation and the dispersal connections among them influence metapopulation persistence. Metapopulation persistence emerges from a dynamic process, namely the serial extinctions and recolonizations of local habitat patches, while measures of persistence are typically based solely on structural properties of the spatial network (e.g., spatial distance

Ecosystems and their embedded ecological communities are almost always by definition collections of oscillating populations. This is apparent given the qualitative reality that oscillations emerge from consumer-resource interactions, which are the elementary building blocks for ecological communities. It is also likely always the case that oscillatory consumer-resource pairs will be connected to one

1. The eradication of invasive small mammal pests is a challenging undertaking, but is needed in many areas of the world to preserve biodiversity. Trapping and poisonous baits are some of the most widespread tools for pest control. Most of the models used to make predictions and to design effective trapping protocols assume that pest populations are behaviourally homogeneous and, in particular, that

Infectious diseases affect many populations and it should be natural to avoid contacts with infected individuals to prevent contagion. Recognizability of infected individuals is essential for infection avoidance. In the case of sexually transmitted infections, such avoidance is accomplished by choosing a healthy mating partner. We find that different mating strategies arise as a consequence of evolution

The original version of this article unfortunately contains a mistake.

The question of how growth, dispersal, and environmental factors affect the persistence and spread of an invasive species is of great importance in spatial ecology. Motivated by the fact that in a species, different development stages may have different vital rates and dispersal characteristics, we propose and study a reaction-diffusion juvenile-adult model, which is a natural extension of the classical

Dryland ecosystems are likely to respond discontinuously to gradual changes in environmental conditions. Direct facilitation between plants, whereby plants improve the local environmental conditions for others, has been shown to be a mechanism contributing to these discontinuous ecosystem transitions. Theoretical models describing dryland vegetation dynamics often consider a single plant species and

Heterospecific pollen transfer by insect pollinators has the potential to drive inter-species competition between flowering plants. This phenomenon may newly arise in a region if insect pollinator or flowering plant populations change. An agent-based simulation is presented to assess the potential impact of heterospecific pollen transfer by insects on two co-flowering plant species within an environment

Identifying directed interactions between species from time series of their population densities has many uses in ecology. This key statistical task is equivalent to causal time series inference, which connects to the Granger causality (GC) concept: x causes y if x improves the prediction of y in a dynamic model. However, the entangled nature of nonlinear ecological systems has led to question the

Phenology is a fundamental determinant of species distributions, abundances, and interactions. In host–parasite interactions, host phenology can affect parasite fitness due to the temporal constraints it imposes on host contact rates. However, it remains unclear how parasite transmission is shaped by the wide range of phenological patterns observed in nature. We develop a mathematical model of the

We explore the hypothesis that intraspecific trait variability can be per se beneficial for the plant when the curvature of the herbivore response to this trait is concave downwards. This hypothesis is based on a mathematical relation for nonlinear averaging (Jensen’s inequality), leading to reduced herbivory when the trait distribution becomes broader. Our study introduces and investigates a model

Understanding and predicting responses to increased mortality is important for conservation biology and population management strategies. In stage-structured populations, increased mortality of a particular stage can have the counterintuitive effect of causing increased abundance in one or more stages (called stage-specific overcompensation in density) or the whole population (called a hydra effect)

We present a single-species metapopulation model structured by population size that is discrete in time. The novel formulation of our model allows for explicit incorporation of both the local, in space, dynamics and new details of the dispersal process. To study the impact of between-patch dynamics in the model, we construct various functions to describe density-dependent dispersal, recolonization

Animal sociality (i.e., conspecific attraction or avoidance) can influence how animals move (i.e., sinuous to straight) across landscapes. Active subsidies are animal-transported resources (e.g., nutrients, detritus, prey) or consumers (e.g., predators, parasites, pathogens) across ecosystem boundaries and can affect ecosystem function. Animal movement has been shown to affect the spatial distributions

The causes and consequences of spatial heterogeneity in population dynamics are of both theoretical and practical interest. Previously, we described (Kummel et al., Oikos 122:896–906, 2013) a field system in which predation by ladybugs drives the development of strong spatial heterogeneity among aphid populations living on nearby plants. In this paper, we investigate the detailed mechanisms responsible

Higher order interactions (HOIs) have been suggested to stabilize diverse ecological communities. However, their role in maintaining species coexistence from the perspective of modern coexistence theory is not known. Here, using generalized Lotka-Volterra model, we derive a general rule for species coexistence modulated by HOIs. We show that where pairwise species interactions fail to promote species

In standard models of spatial harvesting, a resource is distributed over a continuous domain with an agent who may harvest everywhere all the time. For some cases though (e.g., fruits, mushrooms, algae), it is more realistic to assume that the resource is located at a fixed point within that domain so that an agent has to travel in order to be able to harvest. This creates a combined travelling–and–harvesting

Two herbivorous species that share a single plant can interact indirectly with one another, even without direct interaction. One type of indirect interaction is exploitative resource competition, which results from a reduction in plant biomass; another type is that caused by changes in plant traits. These are referred to as indirect effects, mediated, respectively, by biomass and plant traits. The

Seed dispersal is a critical mechanism for escaping specialist natural enemies. Despite this, mean dispersal distances can vary by an order of magnitude among plant species in the same community. Here, we develop a theoretical model to explore how interspecific differences in seed dispersal alter the impact of specialist natural enemies, both on their own and though a trade-off between seed dispersal

Long transients may be common in ecological dynamics, but the implications such dynamics have for ecological management have not been fully explored. Long transient periods can easily be mistaken for stable state dynamics, but may require dramatically different management policies. Here, I explore the optimal management of stochastic ecological systems that may contain either a tipping point or a ghost

Stochastic ecological dynamics result from both transient and asymptotic features of the underlying system, yet explanations for observed patterns often emphasize asymptotics. For example, an ecological state (e.g., a particular population size or community composition) that occurs frequently and/or persists for a meaningful duration might be assumed to be a stable equilibrium, even though transients

The densities of a species and its specialist enemies are expected to covary, giving rare species an advantage that may promote species coexistence. This hypothesis has been particularly applied to tree species coexistence, and theoretical work has investigated how the spatial scale of dispersal and degree of enemy specialization influence coexistence outcomes. A simplifying assumption of this modeling

Syntrophic systems are common in nature and include forms of obligate mutualisms in which each participating organism or component of an organism obtains from the other an essential nutrient or metabolic product that it cannot provide for itself. Models of how these complementary resources are allocated between partners often assume optimal behavior, but whether mechanisms enabling global control exist

Bet-hedging strategies help organisms to decrease variance in their fitness in unpredictably changing environments, by which way lineage fitness can be maximized in the given environment. As one strategy, diversified bet-hedging helps to achieve that by increasing phenotypic variation in fitness-related traits. For example, in diversified tracking, parents may divide the developmental phenotypes of

Many animal populations providing ecosystem services, including harvest, live in seasonal environments and migrate between seasonally distinct ranges. Unfortunately, two major sources of human-induced global change threaten these populations: climate change and anthropogenic barriers. Anthropogenic infrastructure developments present a global threat to animal migrations through increased migration

Persistence of ecological systems under climate change depends on how fast the environment is changing and on how species respond to that change. The rate of environmental change is a key factor affecting the responses. Adaptation, migration to more favorable habitats, and extinction are fundamental responses that species exhibit to climate change, but extinction is the most extreme one when species

Quantifying the strength, sign, and origin of species interactions, along with their dependence on environmental context, is at the heart of prediction and understanding in ecological communities. Pairwise interaction models like Lotka-Volterra provide an important and flexible foundation, but notably absent is an explicit mechanism mediating interactions. Consumer-resource models incorporate mechanism

Wolbachia, a bacterium that infects insect populations, has been examined extensively in Drosophila populations and, in recent years, has garnered significant attention for its potential to reduce the spread of dengue in the Aedes mosquito population. Similar applications to Anopheles mosquitoes for the reduction of malaria have not been as thoroughly studied, as Anopheles were previously thought to

Small-scale spatial variability can affect community dynamics in many ecological and biological processes, such as predator-prey dynamics and immune responses. Spatial variability includes short-range neighbour-dependent interactions and small-scale spatial structure, such as clustering where individuals aggregate together, and segregation where individuals are spaced apart from one another. Yet, a

Many organisms perform regular migrations over long distances. These movements are often related to feeding and reproductive periods and regulated by oceanographic conditions as well as physiological and behavioural traits. Different individual traits and their associated evolutionary constraints will ultimately shape the migratory strategy (and route) of individuals. Optimality theory can provide

Two widely investigated areas of theory in ecology over the past half century are species-abundance distributions (SADs) and Taylor’s power law of fluctuation scaling (TL). This paper connects TL with a classic SAD, MacArthur’s broken-stick model. Each of these models is more than 60 years old, but apparently the connection has not been observed previously. For large numbers of species, the broken-stick

Despite advances in metapopulation theory, recent studies have emphasized the difficulty in understanding and accurately predicting dynamics in nature. We address this knowledge gap by coupling 4 years of population data for the freshwater zooplankter Daphnia pulex, inhabiting 38 newly established ponds in Upstate New York, with (i) a spatially explicit stochastic model and (ii) a deterministic model

Threshold harvesting removes the surplus of a population above a set threshold and takes no harvest below the threshold. This harvesting strategy is known to prevent overexploitation while obtaining higher yields than other harvesting strategies. However, the harvest taken can vary over time, including seasons of no harvest at all. While this is undesirable in fisheries or other exploitation activities

Ecological communities are characterized by the interactions among the species living within a given habitat and can be conveniently represented as networks of interactions. Variation in the way the interactions are organized in the network determines whether the ecological community is able to support coexistence and resist collapse. Analyzing network properties can thus provide insights as to why

Most organisms are defended against others, and defenses such as secondary metabolites in plants vary across species, individuals, and subindividual organs. Plant leaves show an impressive variability in quantitative defense levels, even within the same individual. Such variation might mirror physiological constraints or represent an evolved trait. One important hypothesis for the prevalence of defense

The monitoring of ecosystems and the spread of information concerning their state among human stakeholders is often a lengthy process. The importance of mutual feedbacks between socioeconomic and ecological dynamics is being increasingly recognised in recent studies, but it is generally assumed that the feedback from the environment is instantaneous, ignoring any delay in the spread of ecosystem knowledge

Although the effects of species diversity on food web stability have long been recognized, relatively little is known about the influence of intraspecific diversity. Empirical work has found that intraspecific diversity can increase community resilience and resistance, but few theoretical studies have attempted to use modeling approaches to determine how intraspecific diversity will affect food web

The mid-domain effect states that in a spatially bounded domain species richness tends to decrease from the center towards the boundary, thus producing a peak or plateau of species richness in the middle of the domain even in the absence of any environmental gradient. This effect has been frequently used to describe geographic richness gradients of trophically similar species, but how it scales across

Ecotourism is potentially capable of making biodiversity conservation and ecosystem management economically feasible. Here, we propose a simple model for ecotourism development considering the heterogeneity of tourists, motivated by the case of Jeju Island, South Korea. We analyze the optimal investment in accommodation capacity (i.e., hotels, restaurants, and transportation) and in improving the quality

Over the past century, the Earth has experienced roughly 0.4–0.8 ∘C rise in the average temperature and which is projected to increase between 1.4 and 5.8 ∘C by the year 2100. The increase in the Earth’s temperature directly influences physiological traits of individual species in ecosystems. However, the effect of these changes in community dynamics, so far, remains relatively unknown. Here, we show

The representation of carbon allocation (CA) in ecosystem differs tremendously among models, resulting in diverse responses of carbon cycling and storage to global change. Several studies have highlighted discrepancies between empirical observations and model predictions, attributing these differences to problems of model structure. We analyzed the mathematical representation of CA in models using

Abstract The use of critical slowing down as an early warning indicator for regime switching in observations from noisy dynamical systems and models has been widely studied and implemented in recent years. Some systems, however, have been shown to avoid critical slowing down prior to a transition between equilibria (Ditlevsen and Johnsen 2010; Hastings and Wysham Ecology Letters 13(4):464–472 2010)

The original version of this article unfortunately contains an incorrect panel (b) in Fig. 1 introduced during the production process.

Resource pulses are widespread phenomena in diverse ecosystems. Irruptions of generalist consumers and corresponding generalist predators often follow such resource pulses. This can have severe implications on the ecosystem and also on the spread of diseases or on regional famines. Suitable management strategies are necessary to deal with these systems. In this study, we develop a general model to

Tallgrass prairie has been reduced to a fraction of its original extent, due to rapid conversion to other land use types, especially agricultural and urban. Restoration is a relatively new process to convert agricultural land back to communities dominated by native vegetation. We used a differential equations compartmental model to quantify changes between land use types, incorporating the impact of

Local interactions among individual members of a population can generate intricate small-scale spatial structure, which can strongly influence population dynamics. The two-way interplay between local interactions and population dynamics is well understood in the relatively simple case where the population occupies a fixed domain with a uniform average density. However, the situation where the average

Resource-limited complex systems are ubiquitous in the natural world, as is the potential for instability in such systems. Classic models of interacting species have provided a basis for our understanding of stability in these systems, and suggest that stable coexistence requires weak, rare, and asymmetric interactions. But missing from these models is an explicit understanding of how resource exchange

Whether species diversity contributes to the ecosystem stability has been one of the most heated arguments in community ecology. Potentially different contributions of different ecosystem species have not been explicitly taken into account. With fig species and their associated fig wasp community as model system, we bring community structure into the “diversity-stability” debate by establishing the

Chaotic systems are sensitive to small changes in parameters and initial conditions, but are spatially distributed chaotic populations sensitive to the location of perturbations within their domain? Here, we examine the transient responses to perturbation in a density-dependent population model with asymmetrical dispersal, where offspring are moved some distance downstream of the parent population

One of the most widely verified empirical regularities of ecology is Taylor’s power law of fluctuation scaling, or simply Taylor’s law (TL). TL says that the logarithm of the variances of a set of random variables or a set of random samples is (exactly or approximately) a linear function of logarithm of the means of the corresponding random variables or random samples: logvariance = log a + b log mean

In this article, we present a modern commentary on Ludwig, Jones, and Holling’s classic paper, “Qualitative analysis of insect outbreak systems: the spruce budworm and forest,” published in the Journal of Animal Ecology in 1978. In contrast to papers that become classics for advancing one big idea, Ludwig et al.’s contribution is striking for its breadth of impact. It has become a foundational reference