Related papers: Roots of diversity relations
The composition of ecological communities varies not only between different locations but also in time. Understanding the fundamental processes that drive species towards rarity or abundance is crucial to assessing ecosystem resilience and…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology [2] and Artificial Life research [1]. It is generally agreed that complexity has increased in our universe, giving way to life, multi-cellularity, societies, and systems of…
Understanding the origins of complexity is a fundamental challenge with implications for biological and technological systems. Network theory emerges as a powerful tool to model complex systems. Networks are an intuitive framework to…
One of the classical questions in evolutionary biology is how evolutionary processes are coupled at the gene and species level. With this motivation, we compare the topological properties (mainly the depth scaling, as a characterization of…
Our planet is experiencing an accelerated process of change associated to a variety of anthropogenic phenomena. The future of this transformation is uncertain, but there is general agreement about its negative unfolding that might threaten…
Previous work has shown that species interacting in an ecosystem and actors transacting in an economic context may have notable similarities in behavior. However, the specific mechanism that may underlie similarities in nature and human…
In ecology, climate and other fields, (sub)systems have been identified that can transition into a qualitatively different state when a critical threshold or tipping point in a driving process is crossed. An understanding of those tipping…
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…
Phylogenetics is the study of the evolutionary relationships between organisms. One of the main challenges in the field is to take biological data for a group of organisms and to infer an evolutionary tree, a graph that represents these…
Understanding how species persist under interacting stressors is a central challenge in ecology. We develop a spatially explicit reaction-diffusion framework to investigate competing species in landscapes shaped by climate variability,…
Microbiome-based stratification of healthy individuals into compositional categories, referred to as "community types", holds promise for drastically improving personalized medicine. Despite this potential, the existence of community types…
Life is a complex biological phenomenon represented by numerous chemical, physical and biological processes performed by a biothermodynamic system/cell/organism. Both living organisms and inanimate objects are subject to aging, a biological…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
Understanding the mechanisms that govern species coexistence and biodiversity represents a fundamental challenge in ecology. This study extends the classic rock-paper-scissors model by introducing a context-dependent higher-order…
Complex network theory provides an elegant and powerful framework to statistically investigate different types of systems such as society, brain or the structure of local and long-range dynamical interrelationships in the climate system.…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
We present a model for evolution and extinction in large ecosystems. The model incorporates the effects of interactions between species and the influences of abiotic environmental factors. We study the properties of the model by approximate…
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…
Microbial communities feature an immense diversity of species and this diversity is linked with outcomes ranging from ecosystem stability to medical prognoses. Yet the mechanisms underlying microbial diversity are under debate. While simple…
Living organisms produce metabolites of many types via their metabolisms. Especially, flavonoids, a kind of secondary metabolites, of plant species are interesting examples. Since plant species are believed to have specific flavonoids with…