May a highly touristic tropical island sustain water resources? Navigating troubled waters to berth on a safe shore.

While being a major economic development force for tropical islands, tourism may aggravate disturbances on local water resources (scarcity, pollution) and the surrounding ecosystem. In this work, we used a discrete events modelling approach to characterize trajectories of Cat Ba Island (Vietnam) and its ability to reach specific trajectories. We wanted to assess if a healthy social ecosystem could be compatible with tourism.

On the History of Ecosystem Dynamical Modeling: The Rise and Promises of Qualitative Models.

Ecosystem modeling is a complex and multidisciplinary modeling problem which emerged in the 1950s. It takes advantage of the computational turn in sciences to better understand anthropogenic impacts and improve ecosystem management. For that purpose, ecosystem simulation models based on difference or differential equations were built.

Environmental spillover of emerging viruses: Is it true?

The concept of environmental "spillover" of pathogens to humans is widely used in the scientific literature about emerging diseases with the idea that it is scientifically proven. However, the exact characterization of the mechanism of spillover is simply lacking. A systematic review retrieved 688 articles using this term.

Model-checking ecological state-transition graphs.

Model-checking is a methodology developed in computer science to automatically assess the dynamics of discrete systems, by checking if a system modelled as a state-transition graph satisfies a dynamical property written as a temporal logic formula. The dynamics of ecosystems have been drawn as state-transition graphs for more than a century, ranging from state-and-transition models to assembly graphs. Model-checking can provide insights into both empirical data and theoretical models, as long as they sum up into state-transition graphs.

[Strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of French research in trophic ecology].

The French National Institute of Ecology and Environment (INEE) aims at fostering pluridisciplinarity in Environmental Science and, for that purpose, funds ex muros research groups (GDR) on thematic topics. Trophic ecology has been identified as a scientific field in ecology that would greatly benefit from such networking activity, as being profoundly scattered. This has motivated the seeding of a GDR, entitled "GRET".

Language: A fresh concept to integrate syntactic and semantic information in life sciences.

Several fields in biology tend to view the concept of information from one or the other of two extreme positions. Exclusionists base their stance of total rejection on gene-centrism and gene-determinism, typified by the recently-established endo-Darwinist school of life sciences. At the other end of the spectrum, there is total acceptance, as in the newly developed information-centred paradigms that populate biosemiotics.

How climate, migration ability and habitat fragmentation affect the projected future distribution of European beech.

Recent efforts to incorporate migration processes into species distribution models (SDMs) are allowing assessments of whether species are likely to be able to track their future climate optimum and the possible causes of failing to do so. Here, we projected the range shift of European beech over the 21st century using a process-based SDM coupled to a phenomenological migration model accounting for population dynamics, according to two climate change scenarios and one land use change scenario. Our model predicts that the climatically suitable habitat for European beech will shift north-eastward and upward mainly because (i) higher temperature and precipitation, at the northern range margins, will increase survival and fruit maturation success, while (ii) lower precipitations and higher winter temperature, at the southern range margins, will increase drought mortality and prevent bud dormancy breaking.

Honey pollen: using melissopalynology to understand foraging preferences of bees in tropical South India.

The aim of the study was to use melissopalynology to delineate the foraging preferences of bees in tropical environs. This was done by comparing pollen spectra obtained from the same hives every three months for three years at four sampling locations (in two sites) within a confined landscape mosaic. If melissopalynology is highly replicable, the spatial variation of the pollen spectrum from the honey samples would be much more than the temporal (inter-annual) variations.

How can model comparison help improving species distribution models?

Today, more than ever, robust projections of potential species range shifts are needed to anticipate and mitigate the impacts of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Such projections are so far provided almost exclusively by correlative species distribution models (correlative SDMs). However, concerns regarding the reliability of their predictive power are growing and several authors call for the development of process-based SDMs.

Overview of the Distribution, Habitat Association and Impact of Exotic Ants on Native Ant Communities in New Caledonia.

Ants are among the most ubiquitous and harmful invaders worldwide, but there are few regional studies of their relationships with habitat and native ant communities. New Caledonia has a unique and diverse ant fauna that is threatened by exotic ants, but broad-scale patterns of exotic and native ant community composition in relation to habitat remain poorly documented. We conducted a systematic baiting survey of 56 sites representing the main New Caledonian habitat types: rainforest on ultramafic soils (15 sites), rainforest on volcano-sedimentary soils (13), maquis shrubland (15), Melaleuca-dominated savannas (11) and Acacia spirorbis thickets (2).

Understanding patchy landscape dynamics: towards a landscape language.

Patchy landscapes driven by human decisions and/or natural forces are still a challenge to be understood and modelled. No attempt has been made up to now to describe them by a coherent framework and to formalize landscape changing rules. Overcoming this lacuna was our first objective here, and this was largely based on the notion of Rewriting Systems, also called Formal Grammars.

Origins of evolution: non-acquired characters dominates over acquired characters in changing environment.

Natural Selection is so ubiquitous that we never wonder how it appeared as the evolution rule driving Life. We usually wonder how Life appeared, and seldom do we make an explicit distinction between Life and natural selection. Here, we apply the evolution concept commonly used for studying Life to evolution itself.

Dominance and species co-occurrence in highly diverse ant communities: a test of the interstitial hypothesis and discovery of a three-tiered competition cascade.

The role of competitive exclusion is problematic in highly diverse ant communities where exceptional species richness occurs in the face of exceptionally high levels of behavioural dominance. A possible non-niche-based explanation is that the abundance of behaviourally dominant ants is highly patchy at fine spatial scales, and subordinate species act as insinuators by preferentially occupying these gaps--we refer to this as the interstitial hypothesis. To test this hypothesis, we examined fine-scale patterns of ant abundance and richness according to a three-tiered competition hierarchy (dominants, subdominants and subordinates) in an Australian tropical savanna using pitfall traps spaced at 2 m intervals.