Karl Sigmund is professor at the faculty of mathematics of the University of Vienna, and also works at the Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg. He studied mathematics and worked on dynamical systems before turning to population genetics, theoretical ecology and evolutionary game theory. He wrote a popular book on ‘Games of Life’ (Penguin, 1994) and, jointly with Josef Hofbauer, ...

This article highlights advantages of entropy-based genetic diversity measures, at levels from gene expression to landscapes. Shannon’s entropy-based diversity is the standard for ecological communities. The exponentials of Shannon’s and the related “mutual information” excel in their ability to express diversity intuitively, and provide a generalised method of considering microscopic behaviour...

The metacommunity framework predicts that local coexistence depends on the outcome of local species interactions and regional migration. In analogous fashion, spatial structure among populations can shape species interactions through evolutionary mechanisms. Yet, most metacommunity theories assume that populations do not evolve. Here, we evaluate how evolution shapes local species coexistence a...

Theoretical developments in evolution and ecology have undergone a sea change since the inception of evolutionary game theory in the early seventies. In combination with population genetics, this has enabled theoretical aspects of biological systems to be understood at the genotypic as well as the phenotypic level. This understanding has pervaded a plethora of fields from language evolution to ...

the theory of urban ecology is based on explaining urban spatial structure, studying and describing the reciprocal relationship between human societies in the urban areas and the environment, as well as analyzing the circumstances of urban population segregation and production of everyday life spaces. to study and explain urban ecological structure of mashhad, the case study of the article, we ...

In this paper we develop a dynamical theory of coevolution in ecological communities. The derivation explicitly accounts for the stochastic components of evolutionary change and is based on ecological processes at the level of the individual. We show that the coevolutionary dynamic can be envisaged as a directed random walk in the community’s trait space. A quantitative description of this stoc...

Reactions to the metabolic theory of ecology (MTE) proposed by Brown et al. (2004, this issue) are likely to fall into the following categories. Enthusiastic support.—MTE persuasively demonstrates how a few simple, well-founded physical principles concerning energy and temperature can explain an impressive fraction of the natural variability in organism-level productivity, developmental rates, ...

Dynamic energy budget (DEB) theory offers a perspective on population ecology whose starting point is energy utilization by, and homeostasis within, individual organisms. It is natural to ask what it adds to the existing large body of individual-based ecological theory. We approach this question pragmatically--through detailed study of the individual physiology and population dynamics of the zo...

Several commentaries have appeared recently on the status of ecology as a science, with some being quite pessimistic when comparing ecology to the hard sciences like physics. For example, some ecologists wonder if we will ever have general laws and theories (Roughgarden 1998, Lawton 1999) or become a predictive science (McIntosh 1985, Peters 1991). The reason for this, says Murray (1992), is th...