Related papers: Diversity under variability and extreme variabilit…
Microbes providing public goods are widespread in nature despite running the risk of being exploited by free-riders. However, the precise ecological factors supporting cooperation are still puzzling. Following recent experiments, we…
In a constantly changing world, animals must account for environmental volatility when making decisions. To appropriately discount older, irrelevant information, they need to learn the rate at which the environment changes. We develop an…
Predicting the adaptation of populations to a changing environment is crucial to assess the impact of human activities on biodiversity. Many theoretical studies have tackled this issue by modeling the evolution of quantitative traits…
The processes and mechanisms underlying the origin and maintenance of biological diversity have long been of central importance in ecology and evolution. The competitive exclusion principle states that the number of coexisting species is…
The spatio-temporal dynamics of a population present one of the most fascinating aspects and challenges for ecological modelling. In this article we review some simple mathematical models, based on one dimensional…
We examine the switching dynamics of a stochastic population subjected to a deterministically time-varying environment. Our approach is demonstrated in the realm of ecology on a problem of population establishment. Here, by assuming a…
Phenotypic fluctuations and plasticity can generally affect the course of evolution, a process known as the Baldwin effect. Several studies have recast this effect and claimed that phenotypic plasticity acceler- ates evolutionary rate (the…
Species growing in environments that change in time and space will vary in their abundance across locations, even in the absence of persistent location preferences. Here we quantify this non-equilibrium effect by studying a minimal model of…
Phase variation, or stochastic switching between alternative states of gene expression, is common among microbes, and may be important in coping with changing environments. We use a theoretical model to assess whether such switching is a…
Models in evolutionary game theory traditionally assume symmetric interactions in homogeneous environments. Here, we consider populations evolving in a heterogeneous environment, which consists of patches of different qualities that are…
The dynamics of adaptation is difficult to predict because it is highly stochastic even in large populations. The uncertainty emerges from number fluctuations, called genetic drift, arising in the small number of particularly fit…
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…
Many physical and natural systems, including the population of species, evolve in habitats with spatial stochastic variations of the individuals' motility. We study here the effect of those fluctuations on invasion and genetic loss. A…
Human population is at the centre of research on global environmental change. On the one hand, population dynamics influence the environment and the global climate system through consumption-based carbon emissions. On the other hand, health…
Two mathematical models of macroevolution are studied. These models have population dynamics at the species level, and mutations and extinction of species are also included. The population dynamics are updated by difference equations with…
Competition between individuals drives the evolution of whole species. Although the fittest individuals survive the longest and produce the most offspring, in some circumstances the resulting species may not be optimally fit. Here, using…
We consider the effect of network structure on the evolution of a population. Models of this kind typically consider a population of fixed size and distribution. Here we consider eco-evolutionary dynamics where population size and…
We consider a population model in which the season alternates between winter and summer, and individuals can acquire mutations either that are advantageous in the summer and disadvantageous in the winter, or vice versa. Also, we assume that…
In human societies the probability of strategy adoption from a given person may be affected by the personal features. Now we investigate how an artificially imposed restricted ability to reproduce, overruling ones fitness, affects an…
Population dynamics is constrained by the environment, which needs to obey certain conditions to support population growth. We consider a standard model for the evolution of a single species population density, that includes reproduction,…