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

We consider here mutualisms where there are multiple species sharing a resource supplied by the same partner. If, as commonly assumed, there is competition between the species, then only the superior competitor should persist. Nevertheless, coexistence of multiple species sharing the same mutualistic partner is a widespread phenomenon. Regulation of nutrient exchange, where each species receives resources

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

The metaecosystem framework has been proposed to conceptualize the interactive effects of dispersal and resource flows on the structure and functioning of communities in a heterogeneous environment. Here, we model a two-patch metaecosystem where two species with a trade-off in resource requirements compete for two limiting resources—generalizing the so-called gradostat experimental setup. We study

Contemporary theory of predator coexistence through relative non-linearity in their functional responses strongly relies on the Rosenzweig and MacArthur (1963) equations in which the (autotrophic) prey exhibits logistic growth in the absence of the predators. This implies that the prey is limited by a resource such as light or space, which availability is independent of the predators. This assumption

The marginal value theorem (MVT) provides a framework to predict how habitat modifications related to the distribution of resourcesover patches should impact the realized fitness of individuals and their optimal rate of movement (or patch residence times) across the habitat. The MVT theory has focused on the consequences of changing the shape of the gain functions in some patches, describing for instance

The idea of niche construction is regarded as an interesting, if not essential, element of population dynamics. Classical results from population biology emerge from such a formulation, such as chaotic behavior, the self-organized emergence of Allee points, critical transitions, and hysteresis. Relaxing the assumption of a descending limb in classic 1-D map representations of chaos, the application

The mechanisms which influence coexistence of specialist and generalist species in the same environment are a key focus of ecological theory. We use an agent-based model of community assembly to show that the available resource spectrum (distribution of resources along a niche axis) can play an important role in determining the specialist-generalist balance, even in the absence of spatial structure

Laboratory and field tests have been highlight the importance of choosing an optimal Wolbachia strain to ensure the success of colonization and persistence of the released Aedes aegypti infected mosquito. Thresholds for vertical infection transmission and male sterilization depend on bacterial density and its distribution in mosquitoes tissue, which also affects strongly mosquito fitness. Temperature

The impact of the variation of the number of functional traits on functional diversity assessment is still poorly known. Although the covariation between these two parameters may be desirable in some situations (e.g. if adding functional traits provides relevant new functional information), it may also result from mathematical artefacts and lead to misinterpretation of the results obtained. Here, we

Animals use different modes of movement at different times, in different locations, and on different scales. Incorporating such context dependence in mathematical models represents a substantial increase in complexity, but creates an opportunity to more fully integrate key biological features. Here, we consider the spatial dynamics of a population of foragers with two subunits. In one subunit, foragers

The relationship between species richness and productivity changes with spatial scale, but the way in which it changes and the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. We address this critical knowledge gap using a new mechanistic model of the spatial scaling of species richness–productivity (SP) relationships for a local community. Our model is neutral and hence assumes that species dynamics are driven

Since it was defined by Hutchinson, in 1957, the fundamental niche has been assumed, implicitly or explicitly, to have some convex shape. This assumption requires some critical analysis. In this work, we examine the special case of Grinnellian niches (those composed by sets of points of non-interactive variables in multidimensional spaces). We show that annual species in seasonal environments are likely

We analyze the model of costly signalling theory and show that dishonest signalling is still a possible outcome even for costly indices that cannot be faked. We assume that signallers pay the cost for sending a signal and that the cost correlates negatively with signaller’s quality q and correlates positively with signal’s strength s. We show that for any given function f with continuous derivative

Theoretical models and empirical analyses have combined to suggest that, for some ranges of climate, alternative stable states in vegetation structure may be possible: positive feedbacks with fire may differentiate savanna from forest, while positive feedbacks with hydrological processes may differentiate grassland from savanna. However, existing models have largely failed to include spatially explicit

The number of available sites for establishment is a key determinant of species richness on habitat islands. While most theoretical studies assume habitat size or capacity to be constant, many natural habitats are characterized by dynamic growth in capacity over ecological timescales. A case in point is provided by trees that serve as habitat for vascular and non-vascular epiphytes. Here, we develop

A new mathematical method for the static analysis of ecological systems has recently been developed by the author and was presented in a separate article. Based on this methodology, multiple new ecological system measures and indices of matrix, vector, and scalar types are systematically introduced in the present paper. These mathematical system analysis tools are quantitative ecological indicators

In this article, a new mathematical method for static analysis of compartmental systems is developed in the context of ecology. The method is based on the novel system and subsystem partitioning methodologies through which compartmental systems are decomposed to the utmost level. That is, the distribution of environmental inputs and intercompartmental system flows as well as the organization of the

A fundamental challenge in ecology is to identify the processes which explain how species come to occupy diverse communities. There is uncertainty about whether community composition arises through deterministic processes, whereby trait differences between species make them more or less adapted to certain environmental conditions. We tested the capacity for deterministic processes to explain the long-term

We study how the complexity of evolutionary dynamics in the classic MacArthur consumer-resource model depends on resource uptake and utilization rates. The traditional assumption in such models is that the utilization rate of the consumer is proportional to the uptake rate. More generally, we show that if these two rates are related through a power law (which includes the traditional assumption as

Antipredator behavior is known to have a strong effect on prey population dynamics. While there have been many studies of antipredator behavior in population dynamic models, none have examined how antipredator behavior interacts with predator foraging mode. To examine this process, we incorporated predator and prey velocities into a simple tritrophic food chain. In this model, antipredator behavior

Explaining coexistence in species-rich communities of primary producers remains a challenge for ecologists because of their likely competition for shared resources. Following Hutchinson’s seminal suggestion, many theoreticians have tried to create diversity through a fluctuating environment, which impairs or slows down competitive exclusion. However, fluctuating environment models often only produce

In life histories with generation overlap, selection that acts differently on different life-stages can produce reservoirs of genetic variation, for example, in long-lived iteroparous adults or long-lived dormant propagules. Such reservoirs provide “migration from the past” to the current population, and depending on the trend of environmental change, they have the potential either to slow adaptive