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SUNY Geneseo

2011

Biological

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Retention Time Variability As A Mechanism For Animal Mediated Long-Distance Dispersal, Vishwesha Guttal, Frederic Bartumeus, Gregg Hartvigsen, Andrew L. Nevai Jan 2011

Retention Time Variability As A Mechanism For Animal Mediated Long-Distance Dispersal, Vishwesha Guttal, Frederic Bartumeus, Gregg Hartvigsen, Andrew L. Nevai

Biology

Long-distance dispersal (LDD) events, although rare for most plant species, can strongly influence population and community dynamics. Animals function as a key biotic vector of seeds and thus, a mechanistic and quantitative understanding of how individual animal behaviors scale to dispersal patterns at different spatial scales is a question of critical importance from both basic and applied perspectives. Using a diffusion-theory based analytical approach for a wide range of animal movement and seed transportation patterns, we show that the scale (a measure of local dispersal) of the seed dispersal kernel increases with the organisms' rate of movement and mean seed …


A Network Model For Plant-Pollinator Community Assembly, Colin Campbell, Suann Yang, Reka Albert, Katriona Shea Jan 2011

A Network Model For Plant-Pollinator Community Assembly, Colin Campbell, Suann Yang, Reka Albert, Katriona Shea

Biology

Community assembly models, usually constructed for food webs, are an important component of our understanding of how ecological communities are formed. However, models for mutualistic community assembly are still needed, especially because these communities are experiencing significant anthropogenic disturbances that affect their biodiversity. Here, we present a unique network model that simulates the colonization and extinction process of mutualistic community assembly. We generate regional source pools of species interaction networks on the basis of statistical properties reported in the literature. We develop a dynamic synchronous Boolean framework to simulate, with few free parameters, the dynamics of new mutualistic community formation …