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Tracking the Rise and Fall of Biodiversity - Chicago Humanities Festival

Tracking the Rise and Fall of Biodiversity

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  • ABOUT Stefano Allesina

    During the past decade, Stefano Allesina has developed methods to predict the effects of extinctions in natural communities, investigated which forces and principles are responsible for the shape of ecological networks, and studied ways to partition networks into their principal components. He is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago.

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When species become extinct, what happens in the ecosystem? Using a mix of children’s games and complex computer science applications, Stefano Allesina is working to understand ecological trends over time. Allesina, of the University of Chicago, made a splash in 2009 when he and his colleagues adapted Google’s PageRank algorithm, which prioritizes the order of its search listings, to describe species’ connections to their ecosystems and gauge the impact of extinctions. The concept is simple: a Web page is important if other pages link to it; a species is important if others species eat it. In his latest research, Allesina is using the game Rock, Paper, Scissors to understand and illustrate how competing species survive and coexist. Hear from him on what he’s discovered and why he’s chosen the tools he uses.

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