Publications related to Inferring species interactions in ecological communities: a comparison of methods at different levels of complexity

From roots to canopy: Unraveling the influence of species diversity on tree water relations under warmer and drier climates

The worsening of drought events with rising air temperature alters tree water relations causing severe hydraulic impairments and widespread forest mortality. Mixing tree species with contrasting hydraulic traits could reduce forest vulnerability to extreme ...

EPFL2024

At what spatial scale does natural selection operate? Using multiscale frameworks to calibrate the effects of environmental factors across landscape continuums

Annie Sandrine Guillaume

Patterns in nature arise from processes interacting across a continuum of spatial scales, where new relationships emerge at each level of investigation. These patterns are nested features encompassing fine-scale local patterns, such as topography and geolo ...

EPFL2024

The cost of adaptability: resource availability constrains functional stability under pulsed disturbances

Hannes Markus Peter

Global change exposes ecosystems to changes in the frequency, magnitude, and concomitancy of disturbances, which impact the composition and functioning of these systems. Here, we experimentally evaluate the effects of salinity disturbances and eutrophicati ...

Amer Soc Microbiology2024

The microbial genomics of glacier-fed streams: adaptations to an extreme ecosystem

Massimo Bourquin

Glacier-fed streams are the cold, ultra-oligotrophic, and unstable streams that are fed by glacial meltwater. Despite these extreme conditions, they harbour a diverse and abundant microbial diversity that develops into biofilms, covering the boulders and s ...

EPFL2024

Organ-specific biotransformation in salmonids: Insight into intrinsic enzyme activity and biotransformation of three micropollutants

Kristin Schirmer, Juliane Hollender

Aquatic ecosystems continue to be threatened by chemical pollution. To what extent organisms are able to cope with chemical exposure depends on their ability to display mechanisms of defense across different organs. Among these mechanisms, biotransformatio ...

Elsevier2024

Tree diversity reduces variability in sapling survival under drought

Charlotte Grossiord, Xiaojuan Liu, Jingjing Liang

Enhancing tree diversity may be important to fostering resilience to drought-related climate extremes. So far, little attention has been given to whether tree diversity can increase the survival of trees and reduce its variability in young forest plantatio ...

Wiley2024

Morphological processes and potential for lacustrine delta restoration

Giovanni De Cesare, Stéphanie Joëlle André, Alexandre Philippe Louis Antoine Fourrier

Most lacustrine deltas are nowadays highly anthropized systems. River training works during past centuries considered rivers mainly as vectors of water and sediments from a point source to a sink. However, numerous problems have been identified by resident ...

2024

Invasive palms have more efficient and prolonged CO2 assimilation compared to native sub-Mediterranean vegetation

Marco Conedera, Thibaut Michel Georges Juillard, Charlotte Grossiord, Christoph Bachofen, Janisse Deluigi

In sub-Mediterranean ecosystems, shade-tolerant broadleaf evergreens, especially the invasive Trachycarpus fortunei, are spreading uncontrollably in the forest understorey, impeding the regeneration of the native deciduous woody vegetation. Most invasive s ...

Elsevier2024

Quantifying the Unknown: Data-Driven Approaches and Applications in Energy Systems

Paul Scharnhorst

In light of the challenges posed by climate change and the goals of the Paris Agreement, electricity generation is shifting to a more renewable and decentralized pattern, while the operation of systems like buildings is increasingly electrified. This calls ...

EPFL2024

Lotic-SIPCO2: Adaptation of an open-source CO2 sensor system and examination of associated emission uncertainties across a range of stream sizes and land uses

Andrew Lean Robison

River networks play a crucial role in the global carbon cycle, as relevant sources of carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere. Advancements in high-frequency monitoring in aquatic environments have enabled measurement of dissolved CO2 concentration at tempo ...

Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO)2024

Collective motion in a sheet of microswimmers

Viktor Skultéty

Self-propelled particles such as bacteria or algae swimming through a fluid are non-equilibrium systems where particle motility breaks microscopic detailed balance, often resulting in large-scale collective motion. Previous theoretical work has identified ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Efficient Continual Finite-Sum Minimization

Volkan Cevher, Leello Tadesse Dadi, Efstratios Panteleimon Skoulakis

Given a sequence of functions

f_1,\ldots,f_n

with

f_i:\mathcal{D}\mapsto \mathbb{R}

, finite-sum minimization seeks a point

{x}^\star \in \mathcal{D}

minimizing

\sum_{j=1}^nf_j(x)/n

. In this work, we propose a key twist into the finite-sum minimizat ...

2024

On the selection and effectiveness of pseudo-absences for species distribution modeling with deep learning

Devis Tuia, Nina Marion Aurélia Van Tiel, Robin Adrien Zbinden, Benjamin Alexander Kellenberger, Lloyd Haydn Hughes

Species distribution modeling is a highly versatile tool for understanding the intricate relationship between environmental conditions and species occurrences. However, the available data often lacks information on confirmed species absence and is limited ...

2024

Optimality principles for the analysis of biological processes across scales: From enzyme kinetics to microbiome dynamics

Asli Sahin

Microorganisms are essential for life on Earth, performing key roles in numerous biological processes. Their influence extends across a wide spectrum, from human health and ecological balance to advancements in biotechnology and industrial applications. Th ...

EPFL2024

Treeline displacement may affect lake dissolved organic matter processing at high latitudes and altitudes

Hannes Markus Peter

Climate change induced shifts in treeline position, both towards higher altitudes and latitudes induce changes in soil organic matter. Eventually, soil organic matter is transported to alpine and subarctic lakes with yet unknown consequences for dissolved ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Understanding the sentiment associated with cultural ecosystem services using images and text from social media

Devis Tuia

Social media is increasingly being employed to develop Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) indicators. The image-sharing platform Flickr has been one of the most popular sources of data. Most large-scale studies, however, tend to only use the number of image ...

2024

Winter post-droughts amplify extreme nitrate concentrations in German rivers

Jana Freiin von Freyberg

Hydrological extremes can affect nutrient export from catchments to streams, posing a threat to aquatic ecosystems. In this study, we investigated the effects of hydrological drought on nitrate concentrations in the streamflow of 182 German catchments from ...

Iop Publishing Ltd2024

Exponential convergence to steady-states for trajectories of a damped dynamical system modeling adhesive strings

Nicola De Nitti

We study the global well-posedness and asymptotic behavior for a semilinear damped wave equation with Neumann boundary conditions, modeling a one-dimensional linearly elastic body interacting with a rigid substrate through an adhesive material. The key fea ...

World Scientific Publ Co Pte Ltd2024

Extensions of Peer Prediction Incentive Mechanisms

Adam Julian Richardson

As large, data-driven artificial intelligence models become ubiquitous, guaranteeing high data quality is imperative for constructing models. Crowdsourcing, community sensing, and data filtering have long been the standard approaches to guaranteeing or imp ...

EPFL2024

Graph generative deep learning models with an application to circuit topologies

Igor Krawczuk

Modern integrated circuits are tiny yet incredibly complex technological artifacts, composed of millions and billions of individual structures working in unison. Managing their complexity and facilitating their design drove part of the co-evolution of mode ...

EPFL2024