Related papers: Distribution of phylogenetic diversity under rando…
Phenotypes of individuals in a population of organisms are not fixed. Phenotypic fluctuations, which describe temporal variation of the phenotype of an individual or individual-to-individual variation across a population, are present in…
Mathematical models of population extinction have a variety of applications in such areas as ecology, paleontology and conservation biology. Here we propose and investigate two types of sub-exponential models of population extinction.The…
Phylogenetic network is an evolutionary model that uses a rooted directed acyclic graph (instead of a tree) to model an evolutionary history of species in which reticulate events (e.g., hybrid speciation or horizontal gene transfer)…
The forest of mutations associated to a multitype branching forest is obtained by merging together all vertices of its clusters and by preserving connections between them. We first show that the forest of mutations of any mulitype branching…
Understanding the evolution of a set of genes or species is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology. The problem we study here takes as input a set of trees describing {possibly discordant} evolutionary scenarios for a given set of…
The current rate of species extinction is rapidly approaching unprecedented highs and life on Earth presently faces a sixth mass extinction event driven by anthropogenic activity, climate change and ecological collapse. The field of…
When a biological population expands into new territory, genetic drift develops an enormous influence on evolution at the propagating front. In such range expansion processes, fluctuations in allele frequencies occur through stochastic…
We present new theoretical and empirical results on the probability distributions of species persistence times in natural ecosystems. Persistence times, defined as the timespans occurring between species' colonization and local extinction…
For two decades, the Colless index has been the most frequently used statistic for assessing the balance of phylogenetic trees. In this article, this statistic is studied under the Yule and uniform model of phylogenetic trees. The main tool…
In ecology, species can mitigate their extinction risks in uncertain environments by diversifying individual phenotypes. This observation is quantified by the theory of bet-hedging, which provides a reason for the degree of phenotypic…
Monitoring the distribution of microfossils in stratigraphic successions is an essential tool for biostratigraphic, evolutionary and paleoecologic/paleoceanographic studies. To estimate the relative abundance (%) of a given species, it is…
In this work, an individual-based model of forest insect outbreaks is presented. The results obtained show that the outbreak is an emerging feature of the system. It is a common product of the characteristics of insects, the environment in…
We study the biodiversity problem for resource competition systems with extinctions and self-limitation effects. Our main result establishes estimates of biodiversity in terms of the fundamental parameters of the model. We also prove the…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
Comparative and evolutive ecologists are interested in the distribution of quantitative traits among related species. The classical framework for these distributions consists of a random process running along the branches of a phylogenetic…
The distribution of species body size within taxonomic groups exhibits a heavy right-tail extending over many orders of magnitude, where most species are significantly larger than the smallest species. We provide a simple model of…
In subdivided populations, migration acts together with selection and genetic drift and determines their evolution. Building up on a recently proposed method, which hinges on the emergence of a time scale separation between local and global…
In this paper we present a new way to understand the timing of branching events in phylogenetic trees. Our method explicitly considers the relative timing of diversification events between sister clades; as such it is complimentary to…
The process of `Evolutionary Diffusion', i.e. reproduction with local mutation but without selection in a biological population, resembles standard Diffusion in many ways. However, Evolutionary Diffusion allows the formation of local peaks…
Phylogenetic networks describe the evolution of a set of taxa for which reticulate events have occurred at some point in their evolutionary history. Of particular interest is when the evolutionary history between a set of just three taxa…