Fahimipour, Gil, & Hein (2025) Ecology

Behavioral plasticity in animals influences direct species interactions, but its effects can also spread unpredictably through ecological networks, creating indirect interactions that are difficult to anticipate. We use coarse-grained models to investigate how changes in species behavior shape indirect interactions and influence ecological network dynamics. As an illustrative example, we examine predators that feed on two types of prey, each of which temporarily reduces [...]

Ladau, Fahimipour, Newcomer, et al. (2025) Trends in Microbiology

Microbial inoculants are increasingly used for beneficial purposes in agriculture, bioremediation, and medicine, but they can carry risks of generating invasive microbes. Here, we present a roadmap for guarding against these invasions, proposing developing (i) coherent mechanistic understandings of how microbial inoculants can effect invasions, (ii) predictive models forecasting microbial invasion risks, and (iii) effective management strategies. To guide [...]

Lawton, Fahimipour, & Anderson (2024) Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B

Decisions to disperse from a habitat stand out among organismal behaviours as pivotal drivers of ecosystem dynamics across scales. Encounters with other species are an important component of adaptive decision-making in dispersal, resulting in widespread behaviours like tracking resources or avoiding consumers in space. Despite this, metacommunity models often treat dispersal as a function [...]

Fahimipour, Gil, Rosa Celis, et al. (2023) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Understanding the mechanisms by which information and misinformation spread through groups of individual actors is essential to the prediction of phenomena ranging from coordinated group behaviors to misinformation epidemics. Transmission of information through groups depends on the rules that individuals use to transform the perceived actions of others into their own behaviors. Because it is often not possible to directly infer decision-making strategies in situ, most studies of behavioral spread assume that individuals make decisions by pooling [...]