The world is experiencing significant, largely anthropogenically induced, environmental change. This will impact on the biological world and we need to be able to forecast its effects. In order to produce such forecasts, ecology needs to become more ...

Biologists in search of answers to real-world issues such as the ecological consequences of global warming, the design of species' conservation plans, understanding landscape dynamics and understanding gene expression make decisions constantly that are ...

The world is changing at an unprecedented rate. In such a situation, we need to understand the nature of the change and to make predictions about the way in which it might affect systems of interest; often we may also wish to understand what might be done ...

Recent evidence strongly suggests that biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation continue. How might a systems approach to ecology help us better understand and address these issues? Systems approaches play a very limited role in the science that ...

The mapping of environment, through variation in individuals' life histories, to dynamics can be complex and often poorly known. Consequently, it is not clear how important it is dynamically. To explore this, I incorporated lessons from an empirical ...

A large proportion of studies in systems science focus on processes involving a mixture of positive and negative feedbacks, which are also common themes in evolutionary ecology. Examples of negative feedback are density dependence (population regulation) ...

Terrestrial biosphere models are important tools for diagnosing both the current state of the terrestrial carbon cycle and forecasting terrestrial ecosystem responses to global change. While there are a number of ongoing assessments of the short-term ...

Anticipating how biodiversity will respond to climate change is challenged by the fact that climate variables affect individuals in competition with others, but interest lies at the scale of species and landscapes. By omitting the individual scale, models ...

Motivated by the need to solve ecological problems (climate change, habitat fragmentation and biological invasions), there has been increasing interest in species distribution models (SDMs). Predictions from these models inform conservation policy, ...

The ecosystem service concept has emphasized the role of people within socio-ecological systems (SESs). In this paper, we review and discuss alternative ways of representing people, their behaviour and decision-making processes in SES models using an ...

Research on the interactions between human behaviour and ecological systems tends to focus on the direct effects of human activities on ecosystems, such as biodiversity loss. There is also increasing research effort directed towards ecosystem services. ...

There has been a huge effort in the advancement of analytical techniques for molecular biological data over the past decade. This has led to many novel algorithms that are specialized to deal with data associated with biological phenomena, such as gene ...

Winter chilling is of central importance in the phenology of temperate annual and perennial plants. Chilling accelerates flowering through the process of vernalization and breaks both bud and seed dormancy, permitting the onset of growth in the spring. ...

Modern ecology recognizes that modelling systems across scales and at multiple levels—especially to link population and ecosystem dynamics to individual adaptive behaviour—is essential for making the science predictive. ‘Pattern-oriented modelling’ (POM) ...

Systems approaches have great potential for application in predictive ecology. In this paper, we present a range of examples, where systems approaches are being developed and applied at a range of scales in the field of global change and biogeochemical ...

One of the aims of ecology is to aid policy makers and practitioners through the development of testable predictions of relevance to society. Here, we argue that this capacity can be improved in three ways. Firstly, by thinking more clearly about the ...