Publications related to Biological dispersal

Industrial Biotechnology Conservation Processes: Similarities with Natural Long-Term Preservation of Biological Organisms

Philippe Abdel Sayed, Corinne Scaletta, Lee Ann Laurent-Applegate, Nathalie Hirt-Burri, Laurent Alexis Clément Vannay, Alexis Laurent

Cryopreservation and lyophilization processes are widely used for conservation purposes in the pharmaceutical, biotechnological, and food industries or in medical transplantation. Such processes deal with extremely low temperatures (e.g., -196 degrees C) a ...

MDPI2023

Aerobiology over the Southern Ocean – implications for bacterial colonization of Antarctica

Julia Schmale

Parts of the Antarctic are experiencing dramatic ecosystem change due to rapid and record warming, which may weaken biogeographic boundaries and dispersal barriers, increasing the risks of biological invasions. In this study, we collected air samples from ...

2022

Species conservation in the face of global environmental changes: surface-based modelling of geo-environmental data to identify vulnerable populations

Estelle Rochat

Human activities are resulting in many land-use changes, particularly due to urbanisation and intensification of agricultural practices. Because of these changes, in addition to climate change, many species are facing habitat degradation. In order to avoid ...

EPFL2020

Trait-specific dispersal of bacteria in heterogeneous porous environments: from pore to porous medium scale

Tom Ian Battin, Hannes Markus Peter, David Scheidweiler, Filippo Miele

The dispersal of organisms controls the structure and dynamics of populations and communities, and can regulate ecosystem functioning. Predicting dispersal patterns across scales is important to understand microbial life in heterogeneous porous environment ...

2020

Evaluating Alternative Metacommunity Hypotheses for Diatoms in the McMurdo Dry Valleys Using Simulations and Remote Sensing Data

Tyler Joe Kohler

Diatoms are diverse and widespread freshwater Eukaryotes that make excellent microbial subjects for addressing questions in metacommunity ecology. In the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica, the simple trophic structure of glacier-fed streams provides an ide ...

2020

Global maps of travel time to healthcare facilities

Kristina Gligoric

Access to healthcare is a requirement for human well-being that is constrained, in part, by the allocation of healthcare resources relative to the geographically dispersed human population(1-3). Quantifying access to care globally is challenging due to the ...

2020

Evolving biodiversity patterns in changing river networks

Andrea Rinaldo, Enrico Bertuzzo

Biodiversity patterns are governed by landscape structure and dispersal strategies of residing organisms. Landscape, however, changes, and dispersal strategies evolve with it. It is unclear how these biological and geomorphological changes interplay to aff ...

2019

Dispersal limitations and historical factors determine the biogeography of specialized terrestrial protists

Edward Mitchell, Luca Bragazza, Mariusz Lamentowicz, Enrique Lara, Bertrand Fournier

Recent studies show that soil eukaryotic diversity is immense and dominated by micro-organisms. However, it is unclear to what extent the processes that shape the distribution of diversity in plants and animals also apply to micro-organisms. Major diversif ...

WILEY2019

A minimalist model of extinction and range dynamics of virtual mountain species driven by warming temperatures

Andrea Rinaldo, Enrico Bertuzzo, Damiano Pasetto, Jonathan Giezendanner

A longstanding question in ecology concerns the prediction of the fate of mountain species under climate change, where climatic and geomorphic factors but also endogenous species characteristics are jointly expected to control species distributions. A sign ...

2019

Detection of ultra-low protein concentrations with the simplest possible field effect transistor

Mihai Adrian Ionescu, Elizabeth Buitrago Godinez

Silicon nanowire (Si NW) sensors have attracted great attention due to their ability to provide fast, low-cost, label-free, real-time detection of chemical and biological species. Usually configured as field effect transistors (FETs), they have already dem ...

IOP PUBLISHING LTD2019

Persistence of butterfly populations in fragmented habitats along urban density gradients: motility helps

Stéphane Joost, Estelle Rochat, Ivo Widmer

In a simulation study of genotypes conducted over 100 generations for more than 1600 butterfly’s individuals, we evaluate how the increase of anthropogenic fragmentation and reduction of habitat size along urbanisation gradients (from 7% to 59% of impervio ...

Nature Publishing Group2017

Ecological strategies in stable and disturbed environments depend on species specialisation

Séverine Vuilleumier Varisco

Ecological strategies are integral to understanding species survival in different environments. However, how habitat specialisation is involved in such strategies is not fully understood, particularly in heterogeneous and disturbed environments. Here, we s ...

2016

Multi-scale feedbacks between tree regeneration traits and herbivore behavior explain the structure of pasture-woodland mosaics

Alexandre Buttler, François Gillet, Alexander Ludwig Johannes Peringer

The pasture-woodlands of Central Europe are low-intensity grazing systems in which the structural richness of dynamic forest-grassland mosaics is causal for their high biodiversity. Distinct mosaic patterns in Picea abies- and Fagus sylvatica-dominated pas ...

Springer Verlag2016

Coalescent inferences in conservation genetics: should the exception become the rule?

Valeria Montano

Genetic estimates of effective population size (Ne) are an established means to develop informed conservation policies. Another key goal to pursue the conservation of endangered species is keeping the connectivity across fragmented environments, to which g ...

Royal Soc2016

Generalized receptor law governs phototaxis in the phytoplankton Euglena gracilis

Andrea Rinaldo, Andrea Giometto, Amos Maritan, Florian Altermatt

Phototaxis, the process through which motile organisms direct their swimming toward or away from light, is implicated in key ecological phenomena (including algal blooms and diel vertical migration) that shape the distribution, diversity, and productivity ...

National Academy of Sciences2015

Coexistence of specialist and generalist species is shaped by dispersal and environmental factors

Séverine Vuilleumier Varisco

Disentangling the mechanisms mediating the coexistence of habitat specialists and generalists has been a long-standing subject of investigation. However, the roles of species traits and environmental and spatial factors have not been assessed in a unifying ...

2014

25th Anniversary Article: Label-Free Electrical Biodetection Using Carbon Nanostructures

Klaus Kern, Kannan Balasubramanian

Nanostructures are promising candidates for use as active materials for the detection of chemical and biological species, mainly due to the high surface-to-volume ratio and the unique physical properties arising at the nanoscale. Among the various nanostru ...

Wiley-V C H Verlag Gmbh2014

Measuring the relative effect of factors affecting species distribution model predictions

Anthony Christopher Davison, Emeric Rolland Georges Thibaud

Species distribution models are increasingly used to address conservation questions, so their predictive capacity requires careful evaluation. Previous studies have shown how individual factors used in model construction can affect prediction. Although som ...

Wiley-Blackwell2014

Metapopulation persistence and species spread in river networks

Andrea Rinaldo, Enrico Bertuzzo, Lorenzo Mari, Marino Gatto

River networks define ecological corridors characterised by unidirectional streamflow, which may impose downstream drift to aquatic organisms or affect their movement. Animals and plants manage to persist in riverine ecosystems, though, which in fact harbo ...

Wiley-Blackwell2014

Emerging predictable features of replicated biological invasion fronts

Andrea Rinaldo, Andrea Giometto, Francesco Carrara, Florian Altermatt

Biological dispersal shapes species' distribution and affects their coexistence. The spread of organisms governs the dynamics of invasive species, the spread of pathogens, and the shifts in species ranges due to climate or environmental change. Despite its ...

National Academy of Sciences2013