Withstanding extinction while facing rapid climate change depends on a species' ability to track its ecological niche or to evolve a new one. Current methods that predict climate-driven species' range shifts use ecological modelling without eco-evolutionary dynamics. Here we present an eco-evolutionary forecasting framework that combines niche modelling with individual-based demographic and gen...

Dynamic Energy Budget theory meets individual-based modelling: a generic and accessible implementation Benjamin T. Martin*, Elke I. Zimmer, Volker Grimm and Tjalling Jager Department of Ecological Modelling, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, 04318 Leipzig, Germany; and FALW ⁄Department of Theoretical Biology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1085, NL-1081 HV Amsterdam...

The goal of this article is to discuss advantages of joining visual analytic tools and computer simulation modelling in Forestry. Advantages and possibilities of this uniting have been mentioned earlier (Chertov et al., 2005). Forest ecosystem simulation model, Geographical Information System and Exploratory Data Analysis are the best tools allowing for creating a decision support system (DSS) ...

The niche concept is central to ecology but is often depicted descriptively through observing associations between organisms and habitats. Here, we argue for the importance of mechanistically modelling niches based on functional traits of organisms and explore the possibilities for achieving this through the integration of three theoretical frameworks: biophysical ecology (BE), the geometric fr...

In this paper we present and analyze a nutrient-oxygen-phytoplankton-zooplankton mathematical model simulating lagoon ecological interactions. We obtain sufficient conditions, based on principal eigenvalue criteria -- for the existence of periodic solutions. A decoupled model which arises in the high nutrient regime is then considered in further detail for gathering some explicit conditions on ...

Complex ecosystems display well-defined macroscopic regularities suggesting that some generic dynamical rules operate at the ecosystem level where the relevance of the single-species features is rather weak. Most evolutionary theory deals with genes/species as the units of selection operating on populations. However, the role of ecological networks and external perturbations seems to be at leas...

The world is changing at an unprecedented rate. In such a situation, we need to understand the nature of the change and to make predictions about the way in which it might affect systems of interest; often we may also wish to understand what might be done to mitigate the predicted effects. In ecology, we usually make such predictions (or forecasts) by making use of mathematical models that desc...

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...