Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Title: What Can We Learn From the Tangled Bank? The Networked Organization of Ecological Systems
Speaker: Miguel Lurgi, Swansea University
Abstract: Ever since Darwin portrayed ecological communities with many species and interactions as “tangled banks”, ecologists have tried to understand their complexity and fragility. Network approaches have allowed us to do this by viewing ecosystems’ complexity in a different way to better characterize their tangleness. This has revealed insights into how ecosystems are assembled and how they respond to change. By walking through theoretical and empirical examples from recent research, I will illustrate how we use networks to investigate the structure of diverse ecosystems. In microbial communities we look at the relationship between multicellular hosts and their microbiomes. In terrestrial food webs we attempt to understand how they respond to environmental change.
Profile: Miguel is Associate Professor and head of the Computational Ecology Lab at Swansea University. His research seeks to understand the ecological and evolutionary drivers of complex species interaction networks across spatial scales and ecosystem types. He combines analyses of complex datasets of species distributions and interactions with the development of theoretical models of community assembly and dynamics incorporating ecological and evolutionary processes.
Miguel completed his PhD in Terrestrial Ecology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 2014 and postdocs at the University of Adelaide (2014-2016) and the Theoretical and Experimental Ecology Station of the CNRS (2016-2019). He obtained his BEng in Computer Engineering from the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas, Venezuela. Personal Homepage - computational-ecology-lab.github.io
Find out more about the TSVP on the program website: oist.jp/visiting-program
#Ecology #Microbiome #EcosystemDynamics #Biodiversity #TangledBank #NetworkScience #OIST #TSVP #Theoretical #Science #VisitingProgram #Okinawa #research
Title: What Can We Learn From the Tangled Bank? The Networked Organization of Ecological Systems
Speaker: Miguel Lurgi, Swansea University
Abstract: Ever since Darwin portrayed ecological communities with many species and interactions as “tangled banks”, ecologists have tried to understand their complexity and fragility. Network approaches have allowed us to do this by viewing ecosystems’ complexity in a different way to better characterize their tangleness. This has revealed insights into how ecosystems are assembled and how they respond to change. By walking through theoretical and empirical examples from recent research, I will illustrate how we use networks to investigate the structure of diverse ecosystems. In microbial communities we look at the relationship between multicellular hosts and their microbiomes. In terrestrial food webs we attempt to understand how they respond to environmental change.
Profile: Miguel is Associate Professor and head of the Computational Ecology Lab at Swansea University. His research seeks to understand the ecological and evolutionary drivers of complex species interaction networks across spatial scales and ecosystem types. He combines analyses of complex datasets of species distributions and interactions with the development of theoretical models of community assembly and dynamics incorporating ecological and evolutionary processes.
Miguel completed his PhD in Terrestrial Ecology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 2014 and postdocs at the University of Adelaide (2014-2016) and the Theoretical and Experimental Ecology Station of the CNRS (2016-2019). He obtained his BEng in Computer Engineering from the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas, Venezuela. Personal Homepage - computational-ecology-lab.github.io
Find out more about the TSVP on the program website: oist.jp/visiting-program
#Ecology #Microbiome #EcosystemDynamics #Biodiversity #TangledBank #NetworkScience #OIST #TSVP #Theoretical #Science #VisitingProgram #Okinawa #research
