Related papers: Non-neutral theory of biodiversity
Ecosystems display a complex spatial organization. Ecologists have long tried to characterize them by looking at how different measures of biodiversity change across spatial scales. Ecological neutral theory has provided simple predictions…
Niche and neutral theory are two prevailing, yet much debated, ideas in ecology proposed to explain the patterns of biodiversity. Whereas niche theory emphasizes selective differences between species and interspecific interactions in…
Mutualistic interactions are widespread in nature, from plant communities and microbiomes to human organizations. Along with competition for resources, cooperative interactions shape biodiversity and contribute to the robustness of complex…
Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) phenomena could have a significant effect on the dynamics of ecosystems. The Bak-Sneppen (BS) model is a simple and robust model of biological evolution that exhibits punctuated equilibrium behavior. Here we…
The Bak-Sneppen model of self-organized biological evolution of an infinite ecosystem of randomly interacting species is represented in terms of an infinite set of variables which can be considered as an analog to the set of integrals of…
Competition is the main driver of population dynamics, which shapes the genetic composition of populations and the assembly of ecological communities. Neutral models assume that all the individuals are equivalent and that the dynamics is…
One of the first successes of neutral ecology was to predict realistically-broad distributions of rare and abundant species. However, it has remained an outstanding theoretical challenge to describe how this distribution of abundances…
Structure, composition and stability of ecological populations are shaped by the inter- and intra-species interactions within these communities. It remains to be fully understood how the interplay of these interactions with other factors,…
Spontaneous symmetry breaking plays a fundamental role in many areas of condensed matter and particle physics. A fundamental problem in ecology is the elucidation of the mechanisms responsible for biodiversity and stability. Neutral theory,…
We investigate the phenomenology emerging from a 2-species dynamics under the scenario of a quasi-neutral competition within a metapopulation framework. We employ stochastic and deterministic approaches, namely spatially-constrained…
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…
An ongoing debate in ecology concerns the impacts of ecological drift and selection on community assembly. Here, we show that there is a sharp phase transition in diverse ecological communities between a selection dominated regime (the…
Environmental stochasticity is known to be a destabilizing factor, increasing abundance fluctuations and extinction rates of populations. However, the stability of a community may benefit from the differential response of species to…
The influence of migration on the stochastic dynamics of subdivided populations is still an open issue in various evolutionary models. We develop here a self-consistent mean-field-like method in order to determine the effects of migration…
We study a stochastic community model able to interpolate from a neutral regime to a niche partitioned regime upon varying a single parameter tuning the intensity of niche stabilization, namely the difference between intraspecific and…
The biological requirements for an ecosystem to develop and maintain species diversity are in general unknown. Here we consider a model ecosystem of sessile and mutually excluding organisms competing for space [Mathiesen et al. Phys. Rev.…
A model for economic behavior, under heterogeneous spatial economic conditions is developed. The role of selection pressure in a Bak-Sneppen-like dynamics with entity diffusion on a lattice is studied by Monte-Carlo simulation taking into…
By driven to extinction species less or poorly adapted, the Darwinian evolutionary theory is intrinsically an optimization theory. We investigate two optimization algorithms with such evolutionary characteristics: the Bak-Sneppen and the…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…
Several theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explain observed biodiversity patterns, ranging from the classical niche-based theories, mainly employing a continuous formalism, to neutral theories, based on statistical mechanics of…