Search results for "Ecological networks"
showing 10 items of 13 documents
Ecological dependencies make remote reef fish communities most vulnerable to coral loss
2021
Ecosystems face both local hazards, such as over-exploitation, and global hazards, such as climate change. Since the impact of local hazards attenuates with distance from humans, local extinction risk should decrease with remoteness, making faraway areas safe havens for biodiversity. However, isolation and reduced anthropogenic disturbance may increase ecological specialization in remote communities, and hence their vulnerability to secondary effects of diversity loss propagating through networks of interacting species. We show this to be true for reef fish communities across the globe. An increase in fish-coral dependency with the distance of coral reefs from human settlements, paired with…
Machine learning of microbial interactions using abductive ILP and hypothesis frequency/compression estimation
2021
Interaction between species in microbial communities plays an important role in the functioning of all ecosystems, from cropland soils to human gut microbiota. Many statistical approaches have been proposed to infer these interactions from microbial abundance information. However, these statistical approaches have no general mechanisms for incorporating existing ecological knowledge in the inference process. We propose an Abductive/Inductive Logic Programming (A/ILP) framework to infer microbial interactions from microbial abundance data, by including logical descriptions of different types of interaction as background knowledge in the learning. This framework also includes a new mechanism …
A Multi-Scale Analysis to Measure Ecological Impact of LUCC in a Built Environment
2015
International audience; In human-dominated environments, efforts to preserve ecological connectivity between animal species habitats is an important issue. These areas are indeed concern by anthropogenic pressures leading to rapid land use and land cover changes (LUCC). This is particularly the case of urban fringes, affected by many changes (e.g. urban sprawl) specifically for several decades.Of all the methods to model the ecological networks connectivity, landscape graphs provide a relevant approach, which interest for decision support in land-use planning has already been highlighted (Foltête et al., 2014). This approach allows to represent ecological networks in a simplified way as gra…
Urban Services to Ecosystems - Green Infrastructure Benefits from the Landscape to the Urban Scale
2021
The aim of this book is to bring together multidisciplinary research in the field of green infrastructure design, construction and ecology. The main core of the volume is constituted by contributions dealing with green infrastructure, vegetation science, nature-based solutions and sustainable urban development. The green infrastructure and its ecosystem services, indeed, are gaining space in both political agendas and academic research. However, the attention is focused on the services that nature is giving for free to and for human health and survival. What if we start to see things from another perspective? Our actions shall converge for instance to turn man-made environment like cities f…
Paysage & [et] infrastructures de transport : modélisation des impacts des infrastructures sur les réseaux écologiques
2013
The development of linear infrastructures leads to the fragmentation and the artificialisation of the landscape across scales. Landscape fragmentation is a spatial process that is accompanied by a progressive decrease of the connectivity between the elements needed to conduct ecological processes. Thus, maintaining a good level of connectivity between natural habitats, compatible with human activities, has become a major issue for the preservation of biodiversity.By mobilizing methods from graph theory and landscape ecology, the thesis seeks to demonstrate the value of landscape graphs to model ecological networks and analyze impacts of transportation infrastructures at regional scale.The m…
Centrality in primate-parasite networks reveals the potential for the transmission of emerging infectious diseases to humans
2013
We thank Randi Griffin, Amy Pedersen, Rosa Menendez, Mark Lineham, and two anonymous reviewers for discussion and comments on a previous draft. This work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science (J.M.G. and M.V.), by the Junta de Andalucia (J.M.G.), and by National Science Foundation Grants DEB-0211908 and EF-0723939/0904359 (C.L.N.).
Interspecific attraction between ground-nesting songbirds and ants: the role of nest-site selection
2021
Abstract Background Interspecific interactions within ecological networks can influence animal fitness and behaviour, including nest-site selection of birds and ants. Previous studies revealed that nesting birds and ants may benefit from cohabitation, with interspecific attraction through their nest-site choice, but mutual interactions have not yet been tested. We explored a previously undescribed ecological link between ground-nesting birds and ants raising their own broods (larvae and pupae) within the birds’ nests in a temperate primeval forest of lowland Europe. We tested whether the occurrence of ant broods within bird nests resulted from a mutual or one-sided interspecific attraction …
Plant-animal seed dispersal interactions as key drivers of ecological restoration in a changing world
2022
Many global and European commitments state the need to plant billions of trees and restore millions of hectares of degraded ecosystems to contrast biodiversity loss, desertification and climate change. Seed dispersal is a crucial process promoting vegetation dynamics, and in the Mediterranean, up to 65% of woody plant species need animals for seed dispersal. Therefore, such mutualistic ecological interaction represents a key nature-based solution to help us reaching our commitments. In this presentation first we will report the strong expansion rate and correlated finescale spatio-temporal patterns of woody natural regeneration over a pastureland, using a spatially-explicit framework deploy…
Impacts écologiques des formes d'urbanisation : modélisations urbaines et paysagères
2015
The global increase of urbanization during the past decades have induced a progressive artificialization of natural environments. The building of transport infrastructures and new housings causes a landscape fragmentation in an irreversible way and a strong decrease of the connectivity of ecological habitats. Maintaining the functionality of ecological networks is becoming a major goal of sustainable urban planning policies. With a special focus on urban evolutions in the horizon 2030 in the urban area of Besançon in eastern France (residential development and road traffic evolutions), this thesis aims to assess the potential impact of urban forms on landscape connectivity of animal species…
Le paysage, entre esthétique & écologie : modélisation rétrospective à partir de changements d'occupation du sol
2016
Landscape is both a backdrop to the lives of human populations and a medium for the life cycle of animal species. Landscape changes induced by land-use and land-cover dynamics affect both these dimensions, the one aesthetic, and the other ecological. Because these rationales areusually studied within different disciplines, little research has been done into how the two clashor combine as and when landscape structures change. This work seeks therefore to model the spatial co-evolution of the aesthetic and ecological functions of landscape retrospectively usingspatial metrics based on land-cover data. It focuses on changes in the urban fringes of two French cities (Paris and Besançon) over th…