COVID-19 is an emerging respiratory infectious disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. It was first reported on in early December 2019 in Wuhan, China and within three months spread as a pandemic around the whole globe. Here, we study …
The mid-domain effect states that in a spatially bounded domain species richness tends to decrease from the center towards the boundary, thus producing a peak or plateau of species richness in the middle of the domain even in the absence of any …
Predator–prey cycles rank among the most fundamental concepts in ecology, are predicted by the simplest ecological models and enable, theoretically, the indefinite persistence of predator and prey. However, it remains an open question for how long cyclic dynamics can be self-sustained in real communities. Field observations have been restricted to a few cycle periods and experimental studies indicate that oscillations may be short-lived without external stabilizing factors. Here we performed microcosm experiments with a planktonic predator–prey system and repeatedly observed oscillatory time series of unprecedented length that persisted for up to around 50 cycles or approximately 300 predator generations.
The metaecosystem framework has been proposed to conceptualize the interactive effects of dispersal and resource flows on the structure and functioning of communities in a heterogeneous environment. Here, we model a two-patch metaecosystem where two …