Related papers: Roots of diversity relations
Ecologists and conservation biologists need to identify the relative importance of species to make sound management decisions and effectively allocate scarce resources. We introduce a new method, termed environ centrality, to determine the…
In abstract terms, ecosystem ecology is about determining when two ecosystems, superficially different, are alike in some deeper way. An external observer can choose any ecosystem property as being important. In contrast, two ecosystems are…
The complexity of an ecological community can be distilled into a network, where diverse interactions connect species in a web of dependencies. Species interact not only with each other but indirectly through environmental effects, however…
Studies on distribution, abundance and diversity of species revealed fascinating universalities in macroecology. Many of these patterns, like the species-area and range-abundance relationship or the year-to-year fluctuations in population…
Ecosystems are formed by networks of species and their interactions. Traditional models of such interactions assume a constant interaction strength between a given pair of species. However, there is often significant trait variation among…
A central and long-standing issue in evolutionary theory is the origin of the biological variation upon which natural selection acts1. Some hypotheses suggest that evolutionary change represents an adaptation to the surrounding environment…
Signal transduction, or signal-processing capability, is a fundamental property of nature that manifests universally across systems of different scales -- from quantum behaviour to the biological. This includes the detection of…
We study the statistics of ecosystems with a variable number of co-evolving species. The species interact in two ways: by prey-predator relationships and by direct competition with similar kinds. The interaction coefficients change slowly…
We discuss the relevance of studying ecology within the framework of Complexity Science from a statistical mechanics approach. Ecology is concerned with understanding how systems level properties emerge out of the multitude of interactions…
In any ecosystem, the conditions of the environment and the characteristics of the species that inhabit it are entangled, co-evolving in space and time. We introduce a model that couples active agents with a dynamic environment, interpreted…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
Scale-free and non-computable characteristics of natural networks are found to result from the least-time dispersal of energy. To consider a network as a thermodynamic system is motivated since ultimately everything that exists can be…
Over the last few decades, ecologists have come to appreciate that key ecological patterns, which describe ecological communities at relatively large spatial scales, are not only scale dependent, but also intimately intertwined. The…
Disordered systems theory provides powerful tools to analyze the generic behaviors of highdimensional systems, such as species-rich ecological communities or neural networks. By assuming randomness in their interactions, universality…
An analytic theory of species abundance patterns (SAPs) in biological networks is presented. The theory is based on multispecies replicator dynamics equivalent to the Lotka-Volterra equation, with diverse interspecies interactions. Various…
We propose a model of multispecies populations surviving on distributed resources. System dynamics are investigated under changes in abiotic factors such as the climate, as parameterized through environmental temperature. In particular, we…
Ecosystems are commonly organized into trophic levels -- organisms that occupy the same level in a food chain (e.g., plants, herbivores, carnivores). A fundamental question in theoretical ecology is how the interplay between trophic…
We present an individual based model of evolutionary ecology. The reproduction rate of individuals characterized by their genome depends on the composition of the population in genotype space. Ecological features such as the taxonomy and…
Highly-diverse ecosystems exhibit a broad distribution of population sizes and species turnover, where species at high and low abundances are exchanged over time. We show that these two features generically emerge in the fluctuating phase…
Our planet is roughly closed to matter, but open to energy input from the sun. However, to harness this energy, organisms must transform matter from one chemical (redox) state to another. For example, photosynthetic organisms can capture…