Bert van der Veen

Norwegian University of Science and Technology | NTNU

Food-caching animals can gain nutritional advantages by buffering seasonality in food availability, especially during times of scarcity. The wolverine (Gulo gulo) is a facultative predator that occupies environments of low productivity. As an adaptation to fluctuating food availability, wolverines cache perishable food in snow, boulders, and bogs f...

1. It is common practice for ecologists to examine species niches in the study of community composition. The response curve of a species in the fundamental niche is usually assumed to be quadratic. The center of a quadratic curve represents a species' optimal environmental conditions, and the width its ability to tolerate deviations from the optimu...

Understanding the mechanisms of ecological community dynamics and how they could be affected by environmental changes is important. Population dynamic models have well known ecological parameters that describe key characteristics of species, such as the effect of environmental noise and demographic variance on the dynamics, the long‐term growth rat...

Sorption of nutrients such as NH4⁺ is often quoted as a critical property of biochar, explaining its value as a soil amendment and a filter material. However, published values for NH4⁺ sorption to biochar vary by more than 3 orders of magnitude, without consensus as to the source of this variability. This lack of understanding greatly limits our ab...

Paper 1.1: van der Veen, Bert; Hui, Francis K. C.; Hovstad, Knut Anders; Solbu, Erik Blystad; O'Hara, Robert Brian. Model-based ordination for species with unequal niche widths. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 2021 ;Volume 12.(7) s. 1288-1300 https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13595 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Com...

1. In community ecology, unconstrained ordination can be used to predict latent variables from a multivariate dataset, which generated the observed species composition. 2. Latent variables can be understood as ecological gradients, which are represented as a function of measured predictors in constrained ordination, so that ecologists can better r...

Due to global climate change-induced shifts in species distributions, estimating changes in community composition through the use of Species Distribution Models has become a key management tool. Being able to determine how species associations change along environmental gradients is likely to be pivotal in exploring the magnitude of future changes...

It is common practice for ecologists to examine species niches in the study of community composition. The response curve of a species in the fundamental niche is usually assumed to be quadratic. The center of a quadratic curve represents a species’ optimal environmental conditions, and the width its ability to tolerate deviations from the optimum....