Biodiversity
In this project we develop models and data analysis tools to study biodiversity
Current research topics are:
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Resource competition
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Networks on Networks: The interplay of structure and dynamics in spatial ecological network. This is funded as subproject 1 in DFG Research Unit 1748.
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Cell shapes of marine plankton
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Trait-based approaches to metacommunities. This is funded by DFG as part of Subproject 1 of the collaborative research project DynaCom.
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Indices of biodiversity
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Optimal control of spatial ecosystems
Bernd Blasius
Professor for Mathematical Modelling
I am interested in the theoretical description of complex living systems at the interface of theoretical ecology and applied mathematics
Publications
Estimation of functional diversity and species traits from ecological monitoring data
The rampant loss of biodiversity is starting to be recognized as a global crisis rivaling the climate emergency. To address this …
Coexistence patterns and diversity in a trait-based metacommunity on an environmental gradient
The dynamics of trait-based metacommunities have attracted much attention, but not much is known about how dispersal and spatial …
Functional trait dimensions of trophic metacommunities
Metacommunity ecology currently lacks a consistent functional trait perspective across trophic levels. To foster new cross-taxa …
Optimal Planting Distance in a Simple Model of Habitat Restoration With an Allee Effect
Ecological restoration is emerging as an important strategy to improve the recovery of degraded lands and to combat habitat and …
Optimal stock–enhancement of a spatially distributed renewable resource
We study the economic management of a renewable resource, the stock of which is spatially distributed and moves over a discrete or …
Shape matters: the relationship between cell geometry and diversity in phytoplankton
We analyse data on marine unicellular phytoplankton, exhibiting an astounding diversity of cell sizes and shapes. We quantify the …
Modern models of trophic meta-communities
Dispersal and foodweb dynamics have long been studied in separate models. However, over the past decades, it has become abundantly …
Mid-domain effect for food chain length in a colonization-extinction model
The mid-domain effect states that in a spatially bounded domain species richness tends to decrease from the center towards the …
Long-term cyclic persistence in an experimental predator–prey system
Predator–prey cycles rank among the most fundamental concepts in ecology, are predicted by the simplest ecological models and enable, …
A new dimension: Evolutionary food web dynamics in two dimensional trait space
Species within a habitat are not uniformly distributed. However this aspect of community structure, which is fundamental to many …
Emergence of evolutionary cycles in size-structured food webs
The interplay of population dynamics and evolution within ecological communities has been of long-standing interest for ecologists and …
Evolutionary food web models: effects of an additional resource
Many empirical food webs contain multiple resources, which can lead to the emergence of sub-communities—partitions—in a food web that …