Publications de Andrea Giometto

Generalized size scaling of metabolic rates based on single-cell measurements with freshwater phytoplankton

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan, Andrea Giometto, Anders Meibom, Stéphane Laurent Escrig, Silvia Zaoli, Emilio Marañón

Kleiber's law describes the scaling of metabolic rate with body size across several orders of magnitude in size and across taxa and is widely regarded as a fundamental law in biology. The physiological origins of Kleiber's law are still debated and general ...

National Academy of Sciences2019

On the probabilistic nature of the species-area relation

Andrea Rinaldo, Jonathan Giezendanner, Amos Maritan, Andrea Giometto, Silvia Zaoli

The Species-Area Relation (SAR), which describes the increase in the number of species S with increasing area A, is under intense scrutiny in contemporary ecology, in particular to probe its reliability in predicting the number of species going extinct as ...

2019

Demographic stochasticity and resource autocorrelation control biological invasions in heterogeneous landscapes

Andrea Rinaldo, Andrea Giometto, Florian Altermatt

Mounting theoretical evidence suggests that demographic stochasticity, environmental heterogeneity and biased movement of organisms individually affect the dynamics of biological invasions and range expansions. Studies of species spread in heterogeneous la ...

Wiley2017

The scaling structure of the global road network

Andrea Rinaldo, Enrico Bertuzzo, Emanuele Strano, Andrea Giometto

Because of increasing global urbanization and its immediate consequences, including changes in patterns of food demand, circulation and land use, the next century will witness a major increase in the extent of paved roads built worldwide. To model the effe ...

2017

Covariations in ecological scaling laws fostered by community dynamics

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan, Andrea Giometto, Silvia Zaoli

Scaling laws in ecology, intended both as functional relationships among ecologically relevant quantities and the probability distributions that characterize their occurrence, have long attracted the interest of empiricists and theoreticians. Empirical evi ...

2017

A generalized receptor law governs phototaxis in the phytoplankton Euglena gracilis

Andrea Giometto

2016

Sample and population exponents of generalized Taylor's law

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan, Andrea Giometto

Taylor's law (TL) states that the variance V of a nonnegative random variable is a power function of its mean M; i.e., V = aM(b). TL has been verified extensively in ecology, where it applies to population abundance, physics, and other natural sciences. It ...

National Academy of Sciences2015

Inferring species interactions in ecological communities: a comparison of methods at different levels of complexity

Andrea Rinaldo, Francesco Carrara, Andrea Giometto, Florian Altermatt

Natural communities commonly contain many different species and functional groups, and multiple types of species interactions act simultaneously, such as competition, predation, commensalism or mutualism. However, experimental and theoretical investigat ...

Wiley-Blackwell2015

Big answers from small worlds: a user's guide for protist microcosms as a model system in ecology and evolution

Andrea Giometto, Florian Altermatt

Laboratory microcosm experiments using protists as model organisms have a long tradition and are widely used to investigate general concepts in population biology, community ecology and evolutionary biology. Many variables of interest are measured in order ...

Wiley-Blackwell2015

Generalized receptor law governs phototaxis in the phytoplankton Euglena gracilis

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan, Andrea Giometto, 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

Experimental evidence for strong stabilizing forces at high functional diversity of aquatic microbial communities

Andrea Rinaldo, Francesco Carrara, Andrea Giometto, Florian Altermatt

Unveiling the mechanisms that promote coexistence in biological communities is a fundamental problem in ecology. Stable coexistence of many species is commonly observed in natural communities. Most of these natural communities, however, are composed of spe ...

Ecological Soc Amer2015

The role of fluctuations in ecological patterns and processes

Andrea Giometto

Fluctuations are ubiquitous in nature and are relevant for nearly every ecological process. The main sources of fluctuations in population abundances are demographic and environmental stochasticity, whose effect on local population dynamics, metapopulation ...

EPFL2015

Complex Interaction of Dendritic Connectivity and Hierarchical Patch Size on Biodiversity in River-Like Landscapes

Andrea Rinaldo, Francesco Carrara, Andrea Giometto, Florian Altermatt

Habitat fragmentation and land use changes are causing major biodiversity losses. Connectivity of the landscape or environmental conditions alone can shape biodiversity patterns. In nature, however, local habitat characteristics are often intrinsically lin ...

Univ Chicago Press2014

Scaling body size fluctuations

Andrea Rinaldo, Francesco Carrara, Amos Maritan, Andrea Giometto, Florian Altermatt

The size of an organism matters for its metabolic, growth, mortality, and other vital rates. Scale-free community size spectra (i.e., size distributions regardless of species) are routinely observed in natural ecosystems and are the product of intra- and i ...

National Academy of Sciences2013

Emerging predictable features of replicated biological invasion fronts

Andrea Rinaldo, Francesco Carrara, Andrea Giometto, 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