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.
Several studies in 2012 demonstrated the power of process-based models for describing and fore-casting eco-evolutionary dynamics.
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)
CONTACT DETAILS
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
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
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