Wavelets have been utilized previously in various branches of ecological theory and to identify relationships between disease and long-term climatic patterns.
This is apparent from the fact that the threshold for the strength of disruptive natural selection required to achieve evolutionary branching of the ecological character increases (linearly) with the degree of assortative mating.
The ecological part of the model corresponds to that of the Dieckmann Doebeli model (illustrated in Fig. 2) where evolutionary branching of the ecological character is to be expected whenever the resource distribution (e.g., the distribution of seed sizes) is broader than the resource utilisation curve (the spectrum of seeds that can be consumed by a bird with a given bill size).
In fact, two recombinant strains classified as serovar D that cluster in the same branch as E and F are actually F-like strains, and so, the branch of the most ecological succeeded serovars involve exclusively taxa with E or F backbone.
Ten MPs described the colonial traits (final colony height, added height, percentage of height added, total number of branches, ecological volume, the ratio of skeletal volume to ecological volume, branch spacing, colony width or the lateral dimension of the colony, weight added and Ω, the order of colony complexity; see Table 1 for detailed definition).
The models then incorporate a specific evolutionary process, a phylogeny with branch lengths (assumed to be at least proportional to time), and the selective regimes operative in each branch (derived from ancestral estimation of ecological changes).
The new generation of ecological models are based on evolutionary branching, which provides a plausible mechanism for the generation of a stable regime of disruptive selection and the maintenance of polymorphism.
The ongoing divergence of the morphospace into two branches argues for increasing reproductive isolation, consistent with the model of ecological speciation.
The above example of branching induced by the competition of a consumer species for resources may appear specific, but in the last decade a multitude of ecological scenarios have been identified where evolutionary branching is expected to occur (Dieckmann et al. 2004; Doebeli et al. 2005).
