Coastal ecosystems are experiencing degradation from compound impacts of climate change and multiple anthropogenic disturbances. These pressures often act synergistically complicate designing effective conservation measures; consequently, large-scale coastal restoration actions become a wicked problem. The purpose this study was to use two different food web models in coordinated manner inform ...

1. The ecological niche is a fundamental biological concept. Modelling species’ niches is central to numerous ecological applications, including predicting species invasions, identifying reservoirs for disease, nature reserve design and forecasting the effects of anthropogenic and natural climate change on species’ ranges. 2. A computational analogue of Hutchinson’s ecological niche concept (th...

In this rapidly changing world, improving the capacity to predict future dynamics of ecological systems and their services is essential for better stewardship of the earth system. Prediction relies on models that describe our understanding of the major processes that underlie system dynamics and data about these processes and the present state of ecosystems. Prediction becomes more effective wh...

This paper is about the evolution of hominin intelligence. I agree with defenders of the social intelligence hypothesis in thinking that externalist models of hominin intelligence are not plausible: such models cannot explain the unique cognition and cooperation explosion in our lineage, for changes in the external environment (e.g. increasing environmental unpredictability) affect many lineage...

In this paper we will continue the study of p-closed spaces. This class of spaces is strictly placed between the class of strongly compact spaces and the class of quasi-Hclosed spaces. We will provide new characterizations of p-closed spaces and investigate their relationships with some other classes of topological spaces.

What should and should not be considered an affordance is still an open issue. At the 2002 North American meeting of the International Society for Ecological Psychology, a symposium was held concerning this topic. The articles in this special issue are expanded versions of the papers presented at that symposium. To set the stage for those discussions, this article presents an analysis of the ev...

Abstract Story segmentation is an important problem in multimedia indexing and retrieval and includes detection of commercials as one of its component problems. Commercials appear regularly in television data and are usually treated as noise. Hence, filtering of commercials is an important task. This paper presents a system that detects and filters commercials from broadcast news data. While pr...

The European Water Framework Directive has a high impact on current water management in Belgium. Several restoration scenarios have been worked out by the government. To compare the effect of these scenarios, a combination of a water quality (PEGASE) and ecological assessment models (data driven models based on regression trees) has been developed and applied for the major part of the large riv...

Uncertainty is an intrinsic feature of complex ecological models. Given that it is not possible to rid the models from uncertainty, we are left with taking notice of it for consideration in model-based decision making. Traditional ecological modelling methods and tools do not support explicit accounts of model uncertainty. This work gives a contribution towards making known, or bringing to the ...

Ecological diffusion is a theory that can be used to understand and forecast spatio-temporal processes such as dispersal, invasion, and the spread of disease. Hierarchical Bayesian modelling provides a framework to make statistical inference and probabilistic forecasts, using mechanistic ecological models. To illustrate, we show how hierarchical Bayesian models of ecological diffusion can be im...