Kennedy Building, Department of Life Sciences (Silwood Park Campus), Imperial College London, Buckhurst Road, Ascot, Berks SL5 7PY, UK • +44 (0)2075942213 • s.pawar@imperial.ac.uk
The 'struggle for existence' of living beings is not for the fundamental constitutents of food ... but for the possession of the free energy obtained, chiefly by means of the green plant, from the transfer of radiant energy from the hot sun to the cold earth. — Ludwig Boltzmann, 1886, The Second Law of Thermodynamics
We study whether and how metabolic constraints on individual organisms scale up to complex ecological systems.
We use a combination of mathematical and computational modeling
with analyses of massive ecological datasets
( some call it
ecoinformatics,
we consider it a much-needed extension of bioinformatics )
Our overarching goal is to contribute to a general theoretical framework
for the origin and maintenance of functionally robust population
interaction networks in communities
We work across organisms and
ecosystems, and are particularly interested in the structural and
functional differences and similarities between terrestrial and aquatic
communities
