Nonequilibrium dynamics in conservation biology: Scales, attractors and critical points  

Ricard Solé

Preserving and restoring biodiversity is becoming a great challenge as we face a world where planetary boundaries will likely be crossed over the following decades. Such challenge needs to consider multiple scales of complexity, both in space and time. A common threat in most cases is the presence of nonlinear phenomena generating shifts among alternative states. These breaking points imply a new perception of risk and different management strategies. A broad range of phenomena affect the preservation of healthy communities and constrain the ways to deal with conservation, from local features associated with habitat loss or facilitation to mesoscale or global network-level ecological complexity and the role played by extreme events. How are these scales connected? How can the emergent properties associated with ecosystem dynamics be exploited? Here a synthesis of ideas is presented, with a complex systems view of the different scales involved, the emergent phenomena separating them, and the universal properties that allow defining simple models on each scale.

A summary of the diverse interacting nonlinearities that are involved in this paper is depicted in this drawing by the author. Bifurcations, space and time are connected through the presence of transient dynamics, which affects ecosystem responses and resilience across space and time. Transients, as those related to ghosts close to saddle-node bifurcations, modify our expectations as derived from deterministic models and the fixed-point view of stability. The way time windows are affected by fluctuations is both a challenge (for prediction) and an opportunity (for management).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320724001630

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 A century of statistical Ecology

For over 100 years, Ecology has been an important venue for introducing novel statistical methods and providing accessible guides on best practices in statistical modeling. The proliferation of statistical ecology papers starting in the latter decades of the 20th century reflects an ongoing data revolution (e.g., remote sensing, volunteer-collected data, and automated data collection). The influx of new data types and increased computational power has driven a need for quantitative methods to explain and interpret increasingly large datasets while properly incorporating uncertainty. This collection showcases 36 influential statistical ecology papers that have been published in Ecology throughout its history. The collection is organized thematically, highlighting the areas of statistical ecology that have received the most attention in the journal. The authorship of the papers reflects the discipline’s historical lack of diversity; recent years have seen a rise in the diversity of authors, but more efforts are needed to fully reduce barriers to participation. The accompanying photo is a spring peeper (Pseudacris crucifer), one of the species featured in MacKenzie et al. (2002), which described the first occupancy model, an important advance in modeling species distributions while accounting for imperfect detection.

https://www.esa.org/blog/2024/05/15/a-century-of-statistical-ecology/

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 Introducción la selección natural

¿Cómo es posible un diseño sin un diseñador?  

En este conjunto de videos se le da respuesta a esta pregunta.

Para esto se parte de ideas intuitivas simples, las cuales una vez formalizadas en lenguaje matemático, permiten demostrar cómo surgen diseños en la naturaleza, sin la necesidad de que detrás de estos se encuentre un diseñador.

https://n9.cl/r2zsu4

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