Eco-evolutionary dynamics of living systems: Applications

The concept of the ecological niche – the way a species makes its living – is a cornerstone of studying the eco-evolutionary dynamics of living systems. 

Documenting the outcomes of a workshop on Niche Theory and Speciation co-organized by EEP, five articles published in a special issue of Evolutionary Ecology Research advanced our understanding of the ecological niche and its evolutionary dynamics.

  1. Barabás et al. (2012) addressed the long-standing question of whether evolution leads to continuous coexistence or distinct species, and developed a synthetic framework in which previous efforts can be related and understood.
  2. Brännström et al. (2012) reviewed past achievements, current efforts, and future promises in modeling the ecology and evolution of ecological communities comprising large and diverse sets of species.
  3. Fazalova and Dieckmann (2012) showed that spatial self-structuring accelerates adaptive speciation in sexually reproducing populations.
  4. Ito and Dieckmann (2012) analyzed when ecological niches can split under disruptive selection if a population simultaneously experiences directional selection.
  5. Sapir and Mazzucco (2012) elucidated the role of inbreeding and outbreeding depression in creating spatial patterns of reproductive isolation.

Several studies in 2012 demonstrated the power of process-based models for describing and fore-casting eco-evolutionary dynamics.

  1. Taborsky et al. (2012) showed for the first time that eco-evolutionary dynamics under size-dependent mortality and competition can give rise to ecological communities of several coexisting species with different body sizes.
  2. Nonaka et al. (2013) investigated spatial aggregation in animals and revealed that evolution of aggregation tendency may lead to extinction.
  3. Nah et al. (in preparation) established an eco-evolutionary explanation of bimodal malaria incubation times observed in South Korea.
  4. Rinaldi et al. (2012) investigated the possibility of forecasting the frequency of sexual intercourse in permanent couples.
  5. De Roos et al. found conditions under which unstructured population models adequately describe demographic dynamics and found that even small deviations from these conditions can cause biomass overcompensation.
  6. Boza et al. (2012) demonstrated that cooperative investments between mutualistic species are often evolutionarily unstable, but can be stabilized through polymorphisms in investment levels.

After random assembly through invasions by multiple species (black circles), a community’s invasion-fitness landscape (colored surface) shows that large parts of its niche space (bright colors) remain open to further species invasions.












Elucidating the interplay between spatial structure and ecoevolutionary dynamics is a challenge at the forefront of ecosystem research. Running counter to mainstream belief and textbook coverage, M’Gonigle et al. (2012) demonstrated, in a study published in Nature, the possibility of long-term coexistence of species despite their ecological equivalence (Figure 5 ). This finding has wide-ranging implications for understanding the origin, maintenance, and loss of biodiversity. As a new explanation of biodiversity, it also helps explain why the plethora of ecological differentiations among locally coexisting species, previously alleged to be necessary, have been so difficult to identify in nature. Regarding ecosystem preservation, the results encourage widening the intervention spectrum from preserving ecological niches to preserving mating systems.

 

A new explanation of biodiversity. Even small amounts of spatial environmental heterogeneity (grayscales in a) suffice to guarantee the long-term coexistence of a diverse set of ecologically

equivalent species (with individuals of different species depicted by differently colored circles in b), provided females have a sufficiently strong and costly preference for mating with similar males.


Della Rossa et al. (2012) showed how Alan Turing’s classical technique for assessing the emergence of spatial patterns can be extended to models comprising any number of species, and illustrated the utility of the extended technique by applying it to plant-insect interactions. This decisive methodological advance allowed Della Rossa et al. (2013) to derive sharp conditions for zooplankton patchiness in food chains and food webs, and enabled Fasani and Rinaldi (2012) to show that a cannibalistic and highly dispersing predator increases the likelihood of spatial pattern formation.

Spatial structuring also has important implications for epidemiology. In the first study of its kind, Fukuyo et al. (2012) showed that the success of a suicidal defense strategy against infection, through which infected hosts hasten their own demise, critically depends on the spatial structure of the infected population. This raises the possibility that death from infection could in some cases be an adaptation of the infected host. In a study estimating the risk of polio re-emergence after stop-ping polio vaccination, Sasaki et al. (2012) showed that the successful global eradication of polio is unlikely, as the probability of an outbreak of vaccine-derived virulent viruses for many realistic parameter combinations easily exceeds 90%.(2013)



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Last edited: 31 October 2013

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Ulf Dieckmann

Principal Research Scholar Exploratory Modeling of Human-natural Systems Research Group - Advancing Systems Analysis Program

Principal Research Scholar Systemic Risk and Resilience Research Group - Advancing Systems Analysis Program

Principal Research Scholar Cooperation and Transformative Governance Research Group - Advancing Systems Analysis Program

Evolution and Ecology Program 2012

Evolutionarily sustainable consumption

Integrated assessment of fisheries systems

Equitable governance of common goods

Eco-evolutionary dynamics of living systems: Theory

Systemic risk and network dynamics

Evolutionary vegetation modeling and management

Policy Impact in 2012

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