Howard B Wilson

The University of Queensland | UQ · School of Biological Sciences

Aim Understanding the processes driving population declines in migratory species can be challenging. Not only are monitoring data spatially and temporally sparse, but conditions in one location can carry over to indirectly (and disproportionately) affect the population in another location. Here, we explore whether remote factors can sequentially, a...

Migratory animals are threatened by human-induced global change. However, little is known about how stopover habitat, essential for refuelling during migration, affects the population dynamics of migratory species. Using 20 years of continent-wide citizen science data, we assess population trends of ten shorebird taxa that refuel on Yellow Sea tida...

Migratory animals are threatened by human-induced global change. However, little is known about how stopover habitat, essential for refuelling during migration, affects the population dynamics of migratory species. Using 20 years of continent-wide citizen science data, we assess population trends of ten shorebird taxa that refuel on Yellow Sea tida...

Migratory animals are threatened by human-induced global change. However, little is known about how stopover habitat, essential for refuelling during migration, affects the population dynamics of migratory species. Using 20 years of continent-wide citizen science data, we assess population trends of ten shorebird taxa that refuel on Yellow Sea tida...

Supplementary Figures, Supplementary Tables and Supplementary Note

Preserving large carnivores that perceive humans as prey brings conservation values into direct conflict with human security. Informing when and where humans and large carnivores occupy the same space may reduce attack frequency and promote coexistence. Here, we demonstrate a methodology to better understand the spatiotemporal relationship between...

The Sumatran orangutan is currently listed by the IUCN as critically endangered and the Bornean species as endangered. Unless effective conservation measures are enacted quickly, most orangutan populations without adequate protection face a dire future. Two main strategies are being pursued to conserve orangutans: (i) rehabilitation and reintroduct...

The Sumatran orangutan is currently listed by the IUCN as critically endangered and the Bornean species as endangered. Unless effective conservation measures are enacted quickly, most orangutan populations without adequate management face a dire future. Two main strategies are being pursued to conserve orangutans: (i) rehabilitation and reintroduct...

The presence or absence of a species was one of the points taken into account to select areas or regions included in the “Corredor Marino del Pacífico Oriental Tropical (CMPOT)”. However, for migratory species such as humpback whales, presence is not enough to select one area over other. Quantitative analysis of the migratory patterns of the southe...

Ecology Letters (2011) 14: 886–890 At the heart of our efforts to protect threatened species, there is a controversial debate about whether to give priority to cost-effective actions or whether focusing solely on the most endangered species will ultimately lead to preservation of the greatest number of species. By framing this debate within a decis...

Estimating the abundance of migratory species is difficult because sources of variability differ substantially among species and populations. Recently developed state-space models address this variability issue by directly modeling both environmental and measurement error, although their efficacy in detecting declines is relatively untested for emp...

Classifying species according to their risk of extinction is a common practice and underpins much conservation activity. The reliability of such classifications rests on the accuracy of threat categorizations, but very little is known about the magnitude and types of errors that might be expected. The process of risk classification involves combini...

One of the aims of the conservation strategy for the Southeast Pacific humpback whale population (stock G) is an understanding of its migratory patterns. This study quantified the patterns of return for males and females to two protected areas: Gorgona Island (GI) and Málaga Bay (MB) (Colombia), with the aim of identifying differences in the freque...

1. Dispersal limitation is widely invoked to explain species coexistence and cooperation in the face of competition and cheating. However, empirical evidence from natural ecosystems for the stabilizing effect of space is sparse. 2. We use a Neotropical ant-plant and its ant symbionts to show how mutual dispersal limitation brings about the stable p...

Stochastic spatial models are becoming an increasingly popular tool for understanding ecological and epidemiological problems. However, due to the complexities inherent in such models, it has been difficult to obtain any analytical insights. Here, we consider individual-based, stochastic models of both the continuous-time Lotka-Volterra system and...

When applied at the individual patch level, the classic competition-colonization models of species coexistence assume that propagules of superior competitors can displace adults of inferior competitors (displacement competition). But if adults are invulnerable to displacement by propagules (as trees are to seeds), and propagules compete to replace...

Ecological theory has long supported the idea that species coexistence in a homogeneous habitat is promoted by spatial structure, but empirical evidence for this hypothesis has lagged behind theory. Here we describe a Neotropical ant-plant symbiosis that is ideally suited for testing spatial models of coexistence. Two genera of ants, Allomerus cf....

Natural enemy-victim interactions are of major applied importance and of fundamental interest to ecologists. A key question is what stabilizes these interactions, allowing the long-term coexistence of the two species. Three main theoretical explanations have been proposed: behavioral responses, time-dependent factors such as delayed density depende...

The evolutionary stability of dispersal from source to sink populations has been demonstrated only for models based on contest competition. Models based on declining reproductive value with density show that dispersal from source to sink populations is only stable when there is temporal heterogeneity. In this note, I show that dispersal from source...

Coral bleaching characterized by the expulsion of symbiotic algae (zooxanthellae) is an increasing problem worldwide. Global warming has been implicated as one cause, but the phenomenon cannot be fully comprehended without an understanding of the variability of zooxanthellae populations in field conditions. Results from a 6-year field study are pre...

the local dynamics in each patch, reemerges to destabilize the overall system. Extinction occurs when the parasitoid overexploits its host and then goes extinct itself. This is more likely at higher host and parasitoid dispersal rates, for any given lattice size. These theoretical results quali

SUMMARY It is accepted that accurate estimation of risk of population extinction, or persistence time, requires predic- tion of the e¡ect of £uctuations in the environment on population dynamics. Generally, the greater the magnitude, or variance, of environmental stochasticity, the greater the risk of population extinction. Another characteristic o...

Host–parasitoid metapopulation models have typically been deterministic models formulated with population numbers as a continuous variable. Spatial heterogeneity in local population abundance is a typical (and often essential) feature of these models and means that, even when average population density is high, some patches have small population si...

Attractor reconstruction using embedding techniques is a widely used tool when analysing data from real systems. It allows reconstruction of the system dynamics from only one observable and is thus extremely powerful. We show here that this reconstruction is also possible from spatially coupled systems. We use a common host–parasitoid model as an e...

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We study the population dynamics of a model host-parasitoid community containing two hosts that interact only through a shared generalist parasitoid. Each host is also attacked by a specialist parasitoid, making a community of up to five species of insects. Information from host-parasitoid community ecology is used in deciding how these species int...

Discusses how to quantify and analyse dynamics and patterns in spatially extended ecologies and introduces several new tools and ideas which use space-time dynamical structure. The authors introduce an artificial ecology model of a resource-predator-prey community which is interesting in its own right both ecologically and mathematically. This is g...

We consider an individual-based spatial model of a generic host-pathogen system and explore the differences between such models and mean-field systems. We find a range of new dynamical and evolutionary phenomena, in particular: (i) in this system, selective pressure is substantially reduced compared with the corresponding mean-field models, and art...

We extend the ideas of evolutionary dynamics and stability to a very broad class of biological and other dynamical systems. We simultaneously develop the general mathematical theory and a discussion of some illustrative examples. After developing an appropriate formulation for the dynamics, we define the notion of an evolutionary stable attractor (...

We propose a new method for detecting low-dimensional chaotic time series when there is dynamical noise present. The method identifies the sign of the largest Liapunov exponent and thus the presence or absence of chaos. It also shows when it is possible to assign a value to the exponent. This approach can work for short time series of only 500 poin...

We introduce a new mechanism for evolutionary discontinuities in ecosystems and discuss the relation with punctuated equilibria, stasis and gradualism. We conclude that these phenomena are natural consequences of a nonlinear dynamic approach to evolutionary stability. In addition we discuss some insights into speciation and the role of phenotype co...

We address the question of whether or not childhood epidemics such as measles and chickenpox are chaotic, and argue that the best explanation of the observed unpredictability is that it is a manifestation of what we call chaotic stochasticity. Such chaos is driven and made permanent by the fluctuations from the mean field encountered in epidemics,...