Related papers: Speciation-rate dependence in species-area relatio…
Evolutionary hypotheses to explain the greater numbers of species in the tropics than the temperate zone include greater age and area, higher temperature and metabolic rates, and greater ecological opportunity. These ideas make contrasting…
We derive a linear recursion relation for the species abundance distribution in a statistical model of ecology and demonstrate the existence of a scaling solution.
Time evolution of number of species (genera, families, and others), population of them, and size distribution of present ones and life times are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each genetic taxon increases by a (random)…
Statistical mechanics of relative species abundance (RSA) patterns in biological networks is presented. The theory is based on multispecies replicator dynamics equivalent to the Lotka-Volterra equation, with diverse interspecies…
Background: Speciation corresponds to the progressive establishment of reproductive barriers between groups of individuals derived from an ancestral stock. Since Darwin did not believe that reproductive barriers could be selected for, he…
We analyze the geometry of the species- and genotype-size distribution in evolving and adapting populations of single-stranded self-replicating genomes: here programs in the Avida world. We find that a scale-free distribution (power law)…
We show that spatial extensions of many-species population dynamics models, such as the Lotka-Volterra model with random interactions we focus on in this work, generically exhibit scale-free correlation functions of population sizes in the…
A new model ecosystem consisting of many interacting species is introduced. The species are connected through a random matrix with a given connectivity. It is shown that the system is organized close to a boundary of marginal stability in…
Speciation is of fundamental importance to understanding the huge diversity of life on Earth. In contrast to current phenomenological models, we develop a biophysically motivated approach to study speciation involving the co-evolution of…
Ecological selection is a major driver of community assembly. Selection is classified as stabilizing when species with intermediate trait values gain the highest reproductive success, whereas selection is considered directional when fitness…
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…
The power spectrum, $S$, of horizontal transects of plankton abundance are often observed to have a power-law dependence on wavenumber, $k$, with exponent close to -2: $S(k)\propto k^{-2}$ over a wide range of scales. I present power…
We study the spreading of families in two-dimensional multispecies predator-prey systems, in which species cyclically dominate each other. In each time step randomly chosen individuals invade one of the nearest sites of the square lattice…
Spatially extended population dynamics models that incorporate intrinsic noise serve as case studies for the role of fluctuations and correlations in biological systems. Including spatial structure and stochastic noise in predator-prey…
Geographic ranges of communities of species evolve in response to environmental, ecological, and evolutionary forces. Understanding the effects of these forces on species' range dynamics is a major goal of spatial ecology. Previous…
We develop a mathematical model of extinction and coexistence in a generic predator-prey ecosystem composed of two herbivores in asymmetrical competition and a hunter exerting a predatory pressure on both species. With the aim of…
History-dependent processes are ubiquitous in natural and social systems. Many such stochastic processes, especially those that are associated with complex systems, become more constrained as they unfold, meaning that their sample-space, or…
Periodicity in population dynamics is a fundamental issue. In addition to current species-specific analyses, allometry facilitates understanding of limit cycles amongst different species. So far, body-size regressions have been derived for…
A large number of models of the species abundance distribution (SAD) have been proposed, many of which are generically similar to the log-normal distribution, from which they are often indistinguishable when describing a given data set.…
This work investigates how biodiversity is affected in a cyclic spatial May-Leonard model with hierarchical and non-hierarchical rules. Here we propose a generalization of the traditional rock-paper-scissors model by considering highly…