Eco-Evolutionary Feedback and the Invasion of Cooperation in Prisoner's Dilemma Games

Unveiling the origin and forms of cooperation in nature poses profound challenges in evolutionary ecology. The prisoner's dilemma game is an important metaphor for studying the evolution of cooperation. We here classified potential mechanisms for cooperation evolution into schemes of frequency- and density-dependent selection, and focused on the density-dependent selection in the ecological prisoner's dilemma games. We found that, although assortative encounter is still the necessary condition in ecological games for cooperation evolution, a harsh environment, indicated by a high mortality, can foster the invasion of cooperation. The Hamilton rule provides a fundamental condition for the evolution of cooperation by ensuring an enhanced relatedness between players in low-density populations. Incorporating ecological dynamics into evolutionary games opens up a much wider window for the evolution of cooperation, and exhibits a variety of complex behaviors of dynamics, such as limit and heteroclinic cycles. An alternative evolutionary, or rather succession, sequence was proposed that cooperation first appears in harsh environments, followed by the invasion of defection, which leads to a common catastrophe. The rise of cooperation (and altruism), thus, could be much easier in the density-dependent ecological games than in the classic frequency-dependent evolutionary games

Similar compositional turnover but distinct insular environmental and geographical drivers of native and exotic ants in two oceans

Aim This study aims to quantify the patterns in compositional turnover of native and exotic ants on small islands in two oceans, and to explore whether such patterns are driven by similar environmental, geographical and potentially biotic variables. Location Pacific and Atlantic islands. Time period Present. Major taxa studied Ants. Methods We applied Multi‐Site Generalised Dissimilarity Modelling (MS‐GDM), which relates zeta diversity, the number of species shared by a given number of islands, to differences in environmental, geographical and biotic drivers. The use of zeta diversity enabled us to differentiate the contribution of rare species (shared by few islands) from those of widespread ones (shared by multiple islands) to compositional turnover. For completion, we also related species richness of insular ants per island with the same set of explanatory variables using Generalised Additive Models (GAM). Results Pacific and Atlantic islands have similar patterns of ant species turnover and richness, albeit partly driven by different drivers. Native and exotic species turnover are mostly explained by the same set of variables in the Pacific (annual precipitation and distance to the nearest island), but not in the Atlantic (annual precipitation is a good predictor of native species turnover, but none of the variables considered in our study explained exotic species turnover). No signal of biotic interactions was detected at the insular community level. Main conclusions Successful invasion strategies may depend on a combination of factors specific to the region in question. In the Pacific, milder environments and the absence of natives on certain islands enable exotic ants to select the same types of environment as native ants. In the harsher Atlantic Ocean, however, native ant species are likely to be well adapted to local environmental conditions, making it harder for exotics to become established. Exotic ant species, therefore, potentially rely on other attributes to establish, such as a combination of tolerance to a wide range of environmental conditions and human‐mediated colonization

Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on mobility in ten countries and associated perceived risk for all transport modes

The restrictive measures implemented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have triggered sudden massive changes to travel behaviors of people all around the world. This study examines the individual mobility patterns for all transport modes (walk, bicycle, motorcycle, car driven alone, car driven in company, bus, subway, tram, train, airplane) before and during the restrictions adopted in ten countries on six continents: Australia, Brazil, China, Ghana, India, Iran, Italy, Norway, South Africa and the United States. This cross-country study also aims at understanding the predictors of protective behaviors related to the transport sector and COVID-19. Findings hinge upon an online survey conducted in May 2020 (N = 9,394). The empirical results quantify tremendous disruptions for both commuting and non-commuting travels, highlighting substantial reductions in the frequency of all types of trips and use of all modes. In terms of potential virus spread, airplanes and buses are perceived to be the riskiest transport modes, while avoidance of public transport is consistently found across the countries. According to the Protection Motivation Theory, the study sheds new light on the fact that two indicators, namely income inequality, expressed as Gini index, and the reported number of deaths due to COVID-19 per 100,000 inhabitants, aggravate respondents’ perceptions. This research indicates that socio-economic inequality and morbidity are not only related to actual health risks, as well documented in the relevant literature, but also to the perceived risks. These findings document the global impact of the COVID-19 crisis as well as provide guidance for transportation practitioners in developing future strategies. © 2021 Barbieri et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. *Please note that there are multiple authors for this article therefore only the name of the first 5 including Federation University Australia affiliate “Louisa Lam” is provided in this record*

A survey dataset to evaluate the changes in mobility and transportation due to COVID-19 travel restrictions in Australia, Brazil, China, Ghana, India, Iran, Italy, Norway, South Africa, United States

COVID-19 pandemic has heavily impacted the global community. To curb the viral transmission, travel restrictions have been enforced across the world. The dataset documents the mobility disruptions and the modal shifts that have occurred as a consequence of the restrictive measures implemented in ten countries: Australia, Brazil, China, Ghana, India, Iran, Italy, Norway, South Africa and the United States. An online questionnaire was distributed during the period from the 11st to the 31st of May 2020, with a total of 9 394 respondents. The first part of the survey has characterized the frequency of use of all transport modes before and during the enforcement of the restrictions, while the second part of the survey has dealt with perceived risks of contracting COVID-19 from different transport modes and perceived effectiveness of travel mitigation measures. Overall, the dataset (stored in a repository publicly available) can be conveniently used to quantify and understand the modal shifts and people's cognitive behavior towards travel due to COVID-19. The collected responses can be further analysed by considering other demographic and socioeconomic covariates. © 2020 The Author(s). *Please note that there are multiple authors for this article therefore only the name of the first 5 including Federation University Australia affiliate “Louisa Lam” is provided in this record

zetadiv:An R package for computing compositional change across multiple sites, assemblages or cases

AbstractSpatial variation in compositional diversity, or species turnover, is necessary for capturing the components of heterogeneity that constitute biodiversity. However, no incidence-based metric of pairwise species turnover can calculate all components of diversity partitioning. Zeta (ζ) diversity, the mean number of species shared by any given number of sites or assemblages, captures all diversity components produced by assemblage partitioning. zetadiv is an R package for analysing and measuring compositional change for occurrence data using zeta diversity. Four types of analyses are performed on bird composition data in Australia: (i) decline in zeta diversity; (ii) distance decay; (iii) multi-site generalised dissimilarity modelling; and (iv) hierarchical scaling. Some analyses, such as the zeta decline, are specific to zeta diversity, whereas others, such as distance decay, are commonly applied to beta diversity, and have been adapted using zeta diversity to differentiate the contribution of common and rare species to compositional change.HighlightsAn R package to analyse compositional change using zeta diversity is presented.Zeta diversity is the mean number of species shared by any number of assemblagesZeta diversity captures all diversity components produced by assemblage partitioningAnalyses relate zeta diversity to space, environment and spatial scaleAnalyses differentiate the contribution of rare and common species to biodiversity</jats:sec

Does the self-similar species distribution model lead to unrealistic predictions?

J. Harte et al. demonstrated that the power law form of the species–area relationship may be derived from a bisected, self-similar landscape and a community-level probability rule. Harte’s self-similarity model has been widely applied in modeling species distributions. However, R. D. Maddux showed that this self-similarity model generates biologically unrealistic predictions. We resolve the Harte–Maddux debate by demonstrating that the problems identified by Maddux result from an assumption that the probability of occurrence of a species at one scale is independent of its probability of occurrence at the next. We refer to this as a ‘‘non-heritage assumption.’’ By altering this assumption to one in which each species in the community has an occupancy status that is partially inherited across scales (a scale-heritage assumption), the predictions of the self-similarity model are neither mathematically inconsistent nor biologically unrealistic. Harte’s self-similarity model remains an important framework for modeling species distributions. Our results illustrate the importance of considering patterns of species co-occurrence, and the way in which species occupancy patterns change with scale, when modeling species distributions.the DST-NRF Centre of Invasion Biology for financial support

Evolutionary fields can explain patterns of high-dimensional complexity in ecology

CITATION: Wilsenach, J., Landi, P. & Hui, C. 2017. Evolutionary fields can explain patterns of high-dimensional complexity in ecology. Physical Review E, 95(4):042401, doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.95.042401.The original publication is available at https://journals.aps.org/preOne of the properties that make ecological systems so unique is the range of complex behavioral patterns that can be exhibited by even the simplest communities with only a few species. Much of this complexity is commonly attributed to stochastic factors that have very high-degrees of freedom. Orthodox study of the evolution of these simple networks has generally been limited in its ability to explain complexity, since it restricts evolutionary adaptation to an inertia-free process with few degrees of freedom in which only gradual, moderately complex behaviors are possible. We propose a model inspired by particle-mediated field phenomena in classical physics in combination with fundamental concepts in adaptation, which suggests that small but high-dimensional chaotic dynamics near to the adaptive trait optimum could help explain complex properties shared by most ecological datasets, such as aperiodicity and pink, fractal noise spectra. By examining a simple predator-prey model and appealing to real ecological data, we show that this type of complexity could be easily confused for or confounded by stochasticity, especially when spurred on or amplified by stochastic factors that share variational and spectral properties with the underlying dynamics.https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.95.042401Publisher's versio