Mathematical Models of Selection and Interaction Among Populations

人类是生态群落中的一个物种。 运作 生态环境的变化会对人类的福祉产生重大影响。 理解生态群落的一种方法是利用食物 网。 食物网描述了在一个生态群落中谁吃谁。 食物网对人类健康和福祉很重要，因为 化学和生物毒素通常是浓缩的， 在食物的每一个捕食者-猎物环节中， 网。 这项研究的目的是表明， 报告的食物网可能是由一个小数目的一般 原则，并使用这些一般原则来理解 生态群落的结构和动态。 的理解 已经有了实际应用。 联同 国际水稻研究所在菲律宾，粮食 水稻田的网络将被构建和分析。 本研究 可能会产生新的建议，以改善生物控制， 农业害虫，并提供了一个机会，以测试基本的 关于食物网结构的科学概括。 大幅 将致力于回答新的数学问题， 统计学和生态学研究提出的计算， 人口。 在发展中有智力杠杆 研究生物学问题的数学工具，因为 经验表明，概念、模型和分析技术 在一种生物环境中发展起来的， 他人

Humans are one species in an ecological community. The functioning of the ecological community can strongly affect human well-being. One approach to understanding an ecological community uses food webs. Food webs describe who eats whom in an ecological community. Food webs are important to human health and well-being because chemical and biological toxins are often concentrated, and metabolized energy is lost, in each predator-prey link of the food webs. The aim of the study is to show that the diverse structures of reported food webs may be explained by a small number of general principles, and to use these general principles to understand the structure and dynamics of ecological communities. An understanding of food webs has practiced applications. In collaboration with the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, the food web of rice fields will be constructed and analyzed. This study may yield novel suggestions for improved biological control of agricultural pests and provides an opportunity to test basic scientific generalizations about food web structure. A substantial effort will be devoted to answering new questions of mathematics, statistics, and computation raised by the study of ecology and populations. There is intellectual leverage in developing mathematical tools for studying biological problems, because experience shows that concepts, models, and analytical techniques developed in one biological setting are frequently helpful in others.