Ecology

New modeling work suggests why nature is more diverse than niche-based ecological theory predicts.

On Mount Everest and in the Peruvian Andes, Tracie Seimon uses DNA to study how species and ecosystems respond to climate change, pathogens and other influences.

By replacing thousands of equations with just one, ecology modelers can more accurately assess how close fragile environments are to a disastrous “tipping point.”

“Virovores” — organisms that survive and multiply by eating viruses — might influence the flow of energy through ecosystems.

The ecologist Holly Moeller studies microorganisms that expand their range by absorbing organelles and gaining new metabolic talents from their prey.

The discovery of a hot spot for horizontal gene transfer draws attention to the possible roles of parasites and ecology in such changes.

A custom-built machine learning algorithm can predict when a complex system is about to switch to a wildly different mode of behavior.

New research finds that chaos plays a bigger role in population dynamics than decades of ecological data seemed to suggest.

The lush biodiversity of the Amazon may be due in part to the dynamics of branching rivers, which serve as invisible fences that continuously barricade and merge bird populations.