Population Ecology & Biodiversity Models

← Back to Domain-Specific Families

Abstractions about ecological populations, competition, diversity, viability, species discovery, interaction networks, and mathematical models of community dynamics.

16 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Association (ecology) — The basic phytosociological vegetation unit defined by a recurring species composition, physiognomy and habitat, commonly named through diagnostic taxa.
• Biocultural diversity — The interrelated variation of biological life, cultural practices and languages within socioecological systems and across places and histories.
• Branching process — A stochastic population process in which individuals independently generate random descendants according to a declared reproduction law.
• Competition–colonization trade-off — Explain coexistence in patchy environments when species that dominate occupied patches disperse or establish less effectively than species that rapidly colonize vacancies.
• Decline in amphibian populations — The documented widespread reduction, disappearance and extinction of amphibian populations since the late twentieth century, arising from interacting habitat, disease, pollution, climate and other pressures.
• Functional group (ecology) — A set of organisms grouped by similar ecological effects, resource use, traits, or roles rather than common ancestry alone.
• Integral ecology — A holistic ecological framework treating environmental, social, cultural, economic and ethical systems as inseparable dimensions of one socio-ecological crisis and response.
• Matrix population models — Stage- or age-structured population models that project abundance by multiplying a population-state vector by a matrix of survival, transition, growth, and reproduction rates.
• Minimum viable population — A model-dependent lower population bound associated with a specified probability of persistence over a stated time horizon under demographic, environmental, genetic and catastrophic uncertainty.
• NPZ model — A dynamical pelagic-ecosystem model representing nutrient, phytoplankton and zooplankton pools through coupled uptake, grazing, mortality and recycling rates.
• Numerical response — The change in predator population density produced by changing prey density through demographic and aggregational responses.
• Pollination network — A bipartite ecological network whose two node sets are flowering plants and pollinators and whose links represent observed or inferred pollination interactions.
• Population pressure — Stress arising when population demands approach or exceed the resources, space, institutions, or ecological carrying capacity available to sustain them.
• Random generalized Lotka–Volterra model — A high-dimensional ecological community model whose species interactions and sometimes growth parameters are sampled from probability distributions to study typical stability and diversity behavior.
• Species discovery curve — A cumulative curve relating recorded species richness to search or sampling effort in a defined environment.
• Taxocene — The subset of species in an ecological community that belong to one specified taxonomic group, used as a tractable community component for comparative sampling and analysis.