DAVID , Patrice

The complexity of food webs and how it depends on environmental variables is a longstanding question in ecology. Food-chain length depends on many factors, such as productive space, disturbance and spatial processes. It is not clear though how food-chain length should vary with adaptive evolutionary changes of the constitutive species. Assuming...

How the complexity of food webs depends on environmental variables is a long‐standing ecological question. It is unclear though how food‐chain length should vary with adaptive evolution of the constitutive species. Here we model the evolution of species colonisation rates and its consequences on occupancies and food‐chain length in...

Diversity is a fundamental, yet threatened, property of ecological systems. The idea that diversity can itself favour diversification, in an autocatalytic process, is very appealing but remains controversial. Here, we study a generalized model of ecological communities and investigate how the level of initial diversity influences the...

Evidence is growing that evolutionary dynamics can impact biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationships. However the nature of such impacts remains poorly understood. Here we use a modelling approach to compare random communities, with no trait evolutionary fine-tuning, and co-adapted communities, where traits have co-evolved, in...

Why do some species successfully invade new environments? Which of these invasive species will alter or even reshape their new environment? The answers to these questions are simultaneously critical and complex. They are critical because invasive species can spectacularly alter their new environment, leading to native species extinctions or...