ecology

Percolation and scaling in ecology

Scaling is a central theme in ecology, well this is my opinion, but there are others that think like me, for example Brian Enquist, that organized a symposium for the 100th anniversary of the Ecological Society of America Scaling in Ecology. He mentioned that two of the most influential papers from ESA were about scaling: Simon Levin The Problem of Pattern and Scale in Ecology and J.H. Brown The Metabolic Theory of Ecology.

Biodiversity is not always top-down regulated

One can think of different ways that biodiversity can be regulated in the framework of food-webs or more generally networks of interactions: Top-down: the effect of predation, hervibory, parasitism Botton-up: food/nutrients Disturbance: In a more microscopic way could also have stabilizing influence or not Trophic interactions Competitive or negative interactions Mutualistic or positive interactions No interactions (Neutral)

Metacommunities or self organization principles

I am thinking of writing in Spanish because Spanish is my mother language, but there seem to be not many people writing about ecological science in Spanish. In the end, I started to think in English and then write in English, so the next one should be in Spanish, who knows. I have a sensation about metacommunity theory, it divides things too much. Each of the concepts in the following image tries to keep different processes in its own box.

A protocol towards a general theory of community ecology

Definitive answers are scarce in biology 1 2 but if we want the advance of ecological knowledge we should reach a point where we have a theory we can trust and can be used for prediction. Besides that the use of experimental micro/mesocosmos has been criticized I advocate for its use in testing and generating ecological theory, using the following steps: Do a experimental microcosm with a temporal and spatial homogeneous environment