This paper reviews extant evidence and offers a conceptual framework for the investigation of complex dynamics among human population growth, environmental degradation, poverty, and climate change. The paper introduces theories relating to population growth, environmental degradation, the impact on human well-being, and potential relations with climate change. Poverty is discussed in detail as ...

While language competition models of diachronic language shift are increasingly sophisticated, drawing on sociolinguistic components like variable language prestige, distance from language centers and intermediate bilingual transitionary populations, in one significant way they fall short. They fail to consider contact-based outcomes resulting in mixed language practices, e.g. outcome scenarios...

Integrated Pest Management (IPM) can be defined as “an ecologically based pest control strategy that relies heavily on natural mortality factors and seeks out control tactics that disrupt these factors as little as possible” (Flint & Bosch, 1981). IPM began to be applied because the extensive use of chemical insecticides show different types of environmental damages, as development of resistant...

With growing populations and ever increasing pressure on resources, the need to live sustainably with our environment has increased in significance. When considering such anthropogenic pressures, karst landscapes are as vulnerable, if not more so, than any other environment. Such vulnerability arises from the rapid transit times of percolating water, the poor filtering ability of carbonate bedr...

Taylor's power law is one of the mostly widely known empirical patterns in ecology discovered in the 20th century. It states that the variance of species population density scales as a power-law function of the mean population density. Taylor's power law was named after the British ecologist Lionel Roy Taylor. During the past half-century, Taylor's power law was confirmed for thousands of biolo...

Feedback systems with a single delay time—as described by delay-differential equations—are known to exhibit various dynamical behaviors including complex oscillations and chaos. Here we show that the consideration of a broad distribution of delay times instead of a single delay results in a shift of the dynamical bifurcations toward higher parameter values, yielding a larger set of parameters w...

In this paper I discuss the kinds of idealisations invoked in normative theories—logic, epistemology, and decision theory. I argue that very often the so-called norms of rationality are in fact mere idealisations invoked to make life easier. As such, these idealisations are not too different from various idealisations employed in scientific modelling. Examples of the latter include: fluids are ...

Although bubonic plague is an endemic zoonosis in many countries around the world, the factors responsible for the persistence of this highly virulent disease remain poorly known. Classically, the endemic persistence of plague is suspected to be due to the coexistence of plague resistant and plague susceptible rodents in natural foci, and/or to a metapopulation structure of reservoirs. Here, we...

Abstract Reaction-diffusion models are used in different areas of chemistry problems. Also, coupled reaction-diffusion systems describing the spatiotemporal dynamics of competition models have been widely applied in many real world problems. In this paper, we consider a coupled fractional system with diffusion and competition terms in ecology, and reaction-diffusion growth model of fractional o...

We consider the problem of inference in a probabilistic model for transient populations where we wish to learn about arrivals, departures, and population size over all time, but the only available data are periodic counts of the population size at specific observation times. The underlying model arises in queueing theory (as an Mt/G/∞ queue) and also in ecological models for short-lived animals...