Pablo Marquet

I am currently a member of the Center for Advanced Studies in Ecology and Biodiversity (CASEB) at the Faculty of Biological Sciences of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile and Associate Professor at the Departamento de Ecologia of the same University. My research interests deal with the analysis of ecological system, a paradigmatic Complex Adaptive System. In particular, I am interested in characterizing, from first principles, what are the attributes that make them complex. Several scientists have provided great insights into this question, however ecologists still lack a comprehensive general framework that could bring order to what has been so far a dispersed research tradition entangled in contingent explanations. Ecologists are blessed for being able to see and manipulate their study subjects, however, this is at the same time a curse, to the extent it makes difficult to disentangle the relevant signal from the background noise. My approach to the study of ecological systems is focused on the search for general and invariant principles that underlie their seemingly endless diversity and variability. During my association to the Santa Fe Institute I would like to tackle these issues and develop a minimalist theory of ecological systems that could shed light on the emergence of ecological complexity.

Published Research

Marquet, P.A. 2002. The search for general principles in ecology. Nature 418:723. [PDF] 35 KB

Keitt, T H, & P A Marquet (1996) Extinction cascades in introduced Hawaiian birds suggest self-organized criticality. Journal of Theoretical Biology 182: 161-167. [PDF] 174 KB

Marquet P A, S A Navarrete & J C Castilla (1990) Scaling population density to body size in rocky intertidal communities. Science 250: 1125-1127. [PDF] 713 KB

Keymer, J. E., P. A. Marquet & A.R. Johnson. (1998) Pattern formation in a patch occupancy metapopulation model: A cellular automata approach. Journal of Theoretical Biology 194: 79-90. [PDF] 298 KB

Keymer, J.E., P.A. Marquet, J.X. Velasco-Hernández and S.A. Levin. (2000) Extinction thresholds and metapopulation persistence in dynamics landscapes. The American Naturalist 156: 478-494. [PDF] 702 KB

The papers posted above are not SFI working papers, nor were they funded by SFI. They are solely the work of the author and coauthors, and do not necessarily reflect the research currently being undertaken on the SFI campus.