学术报告

报告题目：Dynamical evolution of ecosystems

报告时间：2021年6月11日（周五）晚上 21：00-22：00

报告地点：Zoom（ID: 345 947 9644）

报告专家：Sandro Azaele 副教授  英国利兹大学

报告摘要：The assembly of an ecosystem such as a tropical forest depends crucially on the species interaction network, and the deduction of its rules is a formidably complex problem1. In spite of this, many recent studies using Hubbell’s neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography2 have demonstrated that the resulting emergent macroscopic behaviour of the ecosystem at or near a stationary state shows a surprising simplicity reminiscent of many physical systems. Indeed the symmetry postulate2, that the effective birth and death rates are species-independent within a single trophic level, allows one to make analytical predictions for various static distributions such as the relative species abundance diversity and the species–area relationship16. In contrast, there have only been a few studies of the dynamics and stability of tropical rain forests. Here we consider the dynamical behaviour of a community, and benchmark it against the exact predictions of a neutral model near or at stationarity. In addition to providing a description of the relative species abundance, our analysis leads to a quantitative understanding of the species turnover distribution and extinction times, and a measure of the temporal scales of neutral evolution. Our model gives a very good description of the large quantity of data collected in Barro Colorado Island in Panama in the period 1990–2000 with just three ecologically relevant parameters and predicts the dynamics of extinction of the existing species.

专家介绍： Sandro Azaele received the B.Sc. degree in theoretical physics in 2002, from University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy, and the Ph.D. degree in physics from University of Padova, Padova, Italy, in 2007. From 2007 to 2009, he was a Research Associate at Department of Civil and Environmental Engineer ing, University of Princeton, Princeton, USA. From 2009 to 2012, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Integrative and Comparative Biology, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK. From 2012 to 2019, he was with the School of Mathematics, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK, as a Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer. He is currently also an Associate Professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy “G. Galileo”, University of Padova, Padova, Italy. His research interests include the non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, noise-induced phenomena, population dynamics, neutral theory of biodiversity, applications of the principle of maximum entropy, and mathematical biology.