Related papers: Fluctuation induces evolutionary branching in a mo…
Ecological communities with many species can be classified into dynamical phases. In systems with all-to-all interactions, a phase where a fixed point is always reached and a dynamically-fluctuating phase have been found. The dynamics when…
Recent methodological advances are enabling better examination of speciation and extinction processes and patterns. A major open question is the origin of large discrepancies in species number between groups of the same age. Existing…
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…
Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…
The dynamics of two competing species in a finite size community is one of the most studied problems in population genetics and community ecology. Stochastic fluctuations lead, inevitably, to the extinction of one of the species, but the…
Ecological systems comprise an astonishing diversity of species that cooperate or compete with each other forming complex mutual dependencies. The minimum requirements to maintain a large species diversity on long time scales are in general…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
In complex ecosystems such as microbial communities, there is constant ecological and evolutionary feedback between the residing species and the environment occurring on concurrent timescales. Species respond and adapt to their surroundings…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
Dispersal of species to find a more favorable habitat is important in population dynamics. Dispersal rates evolve in response to the relative success of different dispersal strategies. In a simplified deterministic treatment (J. Dockery, V.…
We consider two dimensional Lotka-Volterra systems in fluctuating environment. Relying on recent results on stochastic persistence and piecewise deterministic Markov processes, we show that random switching between two environments both…
Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…
Finite-size fluctuations arising in the dynamics of competing populations may have dramatic influence on their fate. As an example, in this article, we investigate a model of three species which dominate each other in a cyclic manner.…
In a wide variety of natural systems, closely-related microbial strains coexist stably, resulting in high levels of fine-scale biodiversity. However, the mechanisms that stabilize this coexistence are not fully understood. Spatial…
Natural ecosystems are characterized by striking diversity of form and functions and yet exhibit deep symmetries emerging across scales of space, time and organizational complexity. Species-area relationships and species-abundance…
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?…
The dynamic nature of life's ability to thrive in diverse and changing planetary environments suggests that habitability and survival depend on the evolutionary path and life adaptation to environmental conditions. Here we explore such…
The transient behavior of an ecosystem with N random interacting species in the presence of a multiplicative noise is analyzed. The multiplicative noise mimics the interaction with the environment. We investigate different asymptotic…
We discuss a simple model of co-evolution. In order to emphasise the effect of interaction between individuals the entire population is subjected to the same physical environment. Species are emergent structures and extinction, origination…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…