Early warning indicators capture catastrophic transitions driven by explicit rates of environmental change.

In response to external changes, ecosystems can undergo catastrophic transitions. Early warning indicators aim to predict such transitions based on the phenomenon of critical slowing down at bifurcation points found under a constant environment. When an explicit rate of environmental change is considered, catastrophic transitions can become distinct phenomena from bifurcations, and result from a delayed response to noncatastrophic bifurcations.

Generalized synchronization in a tritrophic food web metacommunity.

Complete synchronization among the metacommunity is known to elevate the risk of their extinction due to stochasticity and other environmental perturbations. Owing to the inherent heterogeneous nature of the metacommunity, we demonstrate the emergence of generalized synchronization among the patches of dispersally connected tritrophic food web using the framework of an auxiliary system approach and the mutual false nearest neighbor. We find that the critical value of the dispersal rate increases significantly with the size of the metacommunity for both unidirectional and bidirectional dispersals, which in turn corroborates that larger metacommunities are more stable than smaller ones.

Adherence to safety precautions in the operation theatre among anaesthesiologists in the COVID era.

Background And Aims: The COVID-19 pandemic led to significant infections among healthcare workers and deaths warranting the need for personal protective equipment. This study aimed to estimate the proportion of anaesthesiologists adhering to safety precautions and to evaluate their adherence patterns, difficulties faced and coping mechanisms in the operation theatre during the pandemic.

Methods: This was a multicentric mixed methods study conducted among anaesthesiologists from two tertiary care hospitals.

Role of limiting dispersal on metacommunity stability and persistence.

The role of dispersal on the stability and synchrony of a metacommunity is a topic of considerable interest in theoretical ecology. Dispersal is known to promote both synchrony, which enhances the likelihood of extinction, and spatial heterogeneity, which favors the persistence of the population. Several efforts have been made to understand the effect of diverse variants of dispersal in the spatially distributed ecological community.

Expansion of the measles and rubella laboratory network, India.

Objective: To expand the measles and rubella laboratory network of India by integrating new laboratories.

Methods: In collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), the Indian government developed a 10-step scheme to systematically expand the number of laboratories performing serological and molecular testing for measles and rubella. The Indian Council of Medical Research and WHO identified suitable laboratories based on their geographical location, willingness, preparedness, past performance and adherence to national quality control and quality assurance mechanisms.

Metacommunity persistence to environmental change: Stabilizing and destabilizing effects of individual species dispersal.

Ecological communities face a high risk of extinction to climate change which can destabilize ecological systems. In the face of accelerating environmental change, understanding the factors and the mechanisms that stabilize the ecological communities is a central focus in ecology. Although dispersal has been widely used as an important stabilizing process, it remains unclear how individual species dispersal affects the stability and persistence of an ecological community.

COVID-19-related strokes are associated with increased mortality and morbidity: A multicenter comparative study from Bengaluru, South India.

Background: COVID-19-related strokes are increasingly being diagnosed across the world. Knowledge about the clinical profile, imaging findings, and outcomes is still evolving. Here we describe the characteristics of a cohort of 62 COVID-19-related stroke patients from 13 hospitals, from Bangalore city, south India.

Dynamic environment-induced multistability and critical transition in a metacommunity ecosystem.

We study a metacommunity model of consumer-resource populations coupled via dispersal under an environment-dependent framework, and we explore the occurrence of multistability and critical transition. By emphasizing two magnitudes acting on a dynamic environment at temporal and spatial scales, the coupled system with simple diffusive coupling and the nonlinear environmental coupling enables various interesting complex dynamics such as bistability, multistability, and critical transitions. Using the basin stability measure, we find the probability of attaining each alternative state in a multistable region.

Synchronization and entrainment of metapopulations: A trade-off among time-induced heterogeneity, dispersal, and seasonal force.

Demographic and environmental heterogeneities are prevalent across many natural systems. Earlier studies on metapopulation models have mostly considered heterogeneities either in the demographic parameters or in the interaction strength and topology between the spatially separated patches. In contrast, here we study the dynamics of a metapopulation model where each of the uncoupled patches has different periods of oscillations (period mismatch).

Generation and cessation of oscillations: Interplay of excitability and dispersal in a class of ecosystems.

We investigate the complex spatiotemporal dynamics of an ecological network with species dispersal mediated via a mean-field coupling. The local dynamics of the network are governed by the Truscott-Brindley model, which is an important ecological model showing excitability. Our results focus on the interplay of excitability and dispersal by always considering that the individual nodes are in their (excitable) steady states.

Environmental coupling in ecosystems: From oscillation quenching to rhythmogenesis.

How landscape fragmentation affects ecosystems diversity and stability is an important and complex question in ecology with no simple answer, as spatially separated habitats where species live are highly dynamic rather than just static. Taking into account the species dispersal among nearby connected habitats (or patches) through a common dynamic environment, we model the consumer-resource interactions with a ring type coupled network. By characterizing the dynamics of consumer-resource interactions in a coupled ecological system with three fundamental mechanisms such as the interaction within the patch, the interaction between the patches, and the interaction through a common dynamic environment, we report the occurrence of various collective behaviors.

Dispersal-induced synchrony, temporal stability, and clustering in a mean-field coupled Rosenzweig-MacArthur model.

In spatial ecology, dispersal among a set of spatially separated habitats, named as metapopulation, preserves the diversity and persistence by interconnecting the local populations. Understanding the effects of several variants of dispersion in metapopulation dynamics and to identify the factors which promote population synchrony and population stability are important in ecology. In this paper, we consider the mean-field dispersion among the habitats in a network and study the collective dynamics of the spatially extended system.