Gaurav Baruah

Biological modeling is organized inquiry, but how should we think about the process?

My new paper in #EcologyLetters argues that we should model like experimentalists: define treatments, measure responses, validate, perturb, repeat.

👉 doi.org/10.1111/ele....

Do you agree?

Behavioral variation affects persistence of an experimental food-chain https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.04.663144v1

All in all, HOIs hardly promote species diversity/coexistence, and trait variation further disrupts it. This goes in saying that maybe for HOI to promote diversity, it should be high-dimensional or have multiple traits mediate it to positively affect coexistence in competitive communities.

If pairwise competition width is very wide in contrast to the very narrow range at which HOIs come into play, trait-based HOIs can promote diversity than its pairwise counterpart. However, if width of HOI kernel and pairwise are even comparable, HOIs will always reduce species diversity -fig above-

When does trait-based HOI promote species coexistence? The answer lies in the relative widths of pairwise and HOIs competition, i.e., the width at which pairwise effects dominate versus trait-based HOIs dominate.

We searched in extensive ways to understand if it is ever possible for trait-based higher order interactions (HOIs) to promote robust coexistence more so than only pairwise competition. The answer is: mostly not, BUT, it is possible under certain scenarios--

When Do Trait‐Based Higher Order Interactions and Individual Variation Promote Robust Species Coexistence? Higher order interactions mediated by phenotypic traits could foster coexistence only under very special conditions, raising the question of whether HOIs must involve multiple traits to positively af....

Glad to have this out. With Gyorgy and Robert, we exhaustively go above and beyond on how trait-based higher-order competition can promote robust species coexistence. We look at Gaussian trait-based competition and models of trait-hierarchy --
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Unreal and unbelievable

Interested in doing a postdoc at the National Institute of Genetics in Japan focusing on theoretical ecology and evolutionary biology? Consider applying for the NIG postdoc fellowship! www.nig.ac.jp/nig/career-d...

Individualised niches in a variable environment - Consequences for environmental change responses https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.24.644970v1

Happy to share that the first paper of my PhD is out!

We developed a trait-based framework 🌱🦜 to quantify how plant-frugivore interactions and animal movement shape plant functional connectivity—the dispersal of seeds between habitat patches.

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

PLOS statement on recent US Executive Orders and scientific integrity - The Official PLOS Blog Since its founding over twenty five years ago PLOS has been dedicated to advancing open science, ensuring that knowledge is accessible to…

PLOS has issued a statement on recent US Executive Orders and scientific integrity.

We are determined to stand firmly behind our mission, our values and our principles, and against any attempt at censorship or undermining of the core principles of scientific inquiry.

plos.io/3D4O8cH

Do impacts of warming in space equal impacts of warming in time? Rebecca S. L. Lovell, Gary D. Powney, Marc S. Botham, Albert B. Phillimore This is a plain language summary of a Functional Ecology research article which can be found here. As our climate changes,…

📰Published📰

Do impacts of warming in space equal impacts of warming in time?
@rebeccalovell.bsky.social
fesummaries.wordpress.com/2025/01/29/d...

🐝🌍 Here, we present #EuPPollNet

EuPPollNet is a fully open-access European database that provides standardized data on plant-pollinator interactions, helping to drive research and guide conservation efforts.

#EBDPub

🔗 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

We show that a reduced 2-D model of complex tri trophic food webs can very well capture the recovery dynamics of complete food webs from a collapse state.

Predicting recoverability of collapsed food webs through perturbation and dimension reduction - Theoretical Ecology Biodiversity collapse, driven by increasing environmental changes, poses significant threats to ecosystem stability and the provision of essential ecosystem services. Understanding the recoverability of collapsed food webs thus is crucial for devising effective conservation strategies. This study delves into the theoretical exploration of the recoverability of food webs from a collapsed state. Through simple tools like dimension reduction, propagation of species-specific perturbation, and dynamical simulations, we explore whether simple tri-trophic food webs can be recovered from a collapsed state. Our study examines in detail the topological features of food webs that could either facilitate or impede their recovery. We demonstrate that the recoverability of complex food webs can be predicted by using a simple dimension-reduced model, with certain structural factors that could constrain the full recovery of collapsed food webs. Furthermore, we found that such a simple dimension-reduced model can accurately capture the rate of recovery for complex collapsed food webs. In addition, dynamic simulations highlighted the significance of topological features such as connectance and the number of predator links in determining recoverability. Our dimension-reduced modeling framework offers insights into the feasibility of restoring entire complex predator–prey networks through species-specific interventions. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of ecosystem resilience and aids in the development of targeted conservation strategies.

Paper with undergraduate student @swastiktheos.bsky.social is now out link.springer.com/article/10.1...
We take a theoretical perspective in understanding the recoverability of collapsed food-webs & show - simple dimension-reduced model could predict recoverability of collapsed food webs quite well

Why I’ve removed journal titles from the papers on my CV Changing how published papers are displayed could shift the focus from simple metrics to research quality.

Modern scientific publishing puts too much significance on the journal's perceived prestige and not on the quality of the science. This author went so far as to remove journal titles from their CV.

Would you do the same?

#SciPub #AcademicSky 🧪

🚨We are HIRING! 🧪 Please repost!

Lecturer/Senior lecturer in @bristolbiosci.bsky.social

Priority areas:

‘Responding to anthropogenic change’
‘Reversing the biodiversity crisis’

www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

Loss of pollinator diversity consistently reduces reproductive success for wild and cultivated plants Nature Ecology & Evolution - A meta-analysis finds that decreasing diversity of pollinator species has a negative affect on multiple measures of plant reproductive success, with wild plant...

[new paper] You probably suspected that loss of pollinator diversity consistently reduces reproductive success for wild and cultivated plants, but here we quantify it: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A neat blog post by Pragya (not here yet) on how plant "drugs" could impact social interactions of an insects. Behind the paper.

A neat blog post by Pragya (not here yet) on how plant "drugs" could impact social interactions of an insects. Behind the paper.

Turnip sawflies use plant chemicals to shape their social lives! Discover how plant metabolites influence insect networks and fitness in a blog by Pragya Singh and colleagues 🪰
https://buff.ly/3Zd7iFz 🧪 🌏