Tree mortality in tropical forests is a complex ecological process for which modelling approaches need to be improved to better understand, and then predict, the evolution of tree mortality in response to global change. The mortality model introduced here computes an individual probability of dying for each tree in a community. The mortality model uses the ontogenetic stage of the tree because ...

1. The concept of the ecological niche relates a set of environmental variables to the fitness of species, while habitat suitability models (HSMs) relate environmental variables to the likelihood of occurrence of the species. In spite of this relationship, the concepts are weakly linked in the literature, and there is a strong need for better integration. 2. We selectively reviewed the literatu...

Modelling the spatial spread of vector-borne zoonotic pathogens maintained in enzootic transmission cycles remains a major challenge. The best available spatio-temporal data on pathogen spread often take the form of human disease surveillance data. By applying a classic ecological approach-occupancy modelling-to an epidemiological question of disease spread, we used surveillance data to examine...

THORSTEN WIEGAND, J. JULIO CAMARERO*, NADJA RÜGER and EMILIA GUTIÉRREZ† Department of Ecological Modelling, Centre for Environmental Research, PF 500136, D-04301 Leipzig, Germany, * Unidad de Recursos Forestales, Centro de Investigación y Tecnología Agroalimentaria, Gobierno de Aragón. Apdo. 727, E-50080 Zaragoza, Spain, and † Departament d’Ecologia, Facultat de Biologia, Universitat de Barcelo...

Interpretation : Lake Mogan, having high ecological and cultural significance, has been under intense pressure of urbanization and industrialization due to its location on the periphery of the capital Ankara. In this study, we analyzed data from satellite remote sensing, Geographic Information System and Cellular Automata Markov Chain modelling to predict land use/cover changes in Lake Mogan an...

In this contribution, a prototypical development platform is presented, which supports model development of standard and hybrid low level Petri nets with respect to the requirements of environmental modelling. The basic theory of hybrid Petri nets with important extensions for ecological modelling are summarised, and the development platform is shortly described. Two examples are chosen for det...

Network ecology is a rising field of quantitative biology representing ecosystems as complex networks. A suitable example is parasite spreading: several parasites may be transmitted among their hosts through different mechanisms, each one giving rise to a network of interactions. Modelling these networked, ecological interactions at the same time is still an open challenge. We present a novel s...