Although ecology and biogeography had common origins in the natural history of the nineteenth century, they diverged substantially during the early twentieth century as ecology became increasingly hypothesis-driven and experimental. This mechanistic focus narrowed ecology's purview to local scales of time and space, and mostly excluded large-scale phenomena and historical explanations. In paral...

A new approach toward understanding marine ecosystems has emerged through the integration of ecological physiology and macroecology. This multidisciplinary approach, titled here marine macrophysiology, facilitates unique insight into the foundation of macro-scale ecological patterns, such as biogeographic distributions, via examination of functional attributes of marine organisms across large s...

Predator-prey relationships are one of the most studied interactions in population ecology. However, little attention has been paid to the possibility of role exchange between species, despite firm field evidence of such phenomena in nature. In this paper, we build a mathematical model capable of reproducing the main phenomenological features of role reversal in a classical system and present r...

The major environmental problems of the twentyfirst century, including climate change, water scarcity, pollution and resource exhaustion, represent a new category of crisis and highlight the desperate need for an integrated science of socioecological phenomena. To help establish the foundations of such a science, we explore three traditions of mathematical theory: the Lotka–Volterra interaction...

Environmental transformation processes, including those occurring in natural and engineered systems, do not necessarily drastically alter molecular structures of bioactive organic contaminants. While the majority of generated transformation products are likely benign, substantial conservation of structure in transformation products can imply conservation or even creation of bioactivity across m...

Chaos theory and models related to non-linear dynamic systems has increased in importance in recent decades. In fact, chaos is one of the concepts that has most rapidly expanded in research topics. Chaos is ordinarily disorder or confusion; scientifically, it represents a disarray connection, but basically, it involves much more than that. Change and time are closely linked, and they are essent...

With the growth of statistical modeling in the ecological sciences, researchers are using more complex methods, such as artificial neural networks (ANNs), to address problems associated with pattern recognition and prediction. Although in many studies ANNs have been shown to exhibit superior predictive power compared to traditional approaches, they have also been labeled a ‘‘black box’’ because...

An important class of ecological problems concerns propagation processes. In ecological modelling, these phenomena generally occur on large scales and are generally difficult to simulate efficiently because of the number of entities. Studies of this kind of phenomena lack genericity and reusability because they are often presented from the point of view of a single domain expert. Simulations ma...

Scientists have aimed at exploring land use and land cover change (LUCC) and modeling future landscape pattern in order to improve our understanding of the causes and consequences of these phenomena. This study addresses LUCC in the upper reaches of Minjiang River, China, from 1974 to 2000. Based on remotely sensed images, LUCC and landscape pattern change were assessed using cross-tabulation a...

Ecological structures and processes occur at specific spatiotemporal scales, and interactions that occur across multiple scales mediate scale-specific (e.g., individual, community, local, or regional) responses to disturbance. Despite the importance of scale, explicitly incorporating a multi-scale perspective into research and management actions remains a challenge. The discontinuity hypothesis...