Related papers: The general theory of species abundance distributi…
Source-sink systems are metapopulations of habitat patches with different, and possibly temporally varying, habitat qualities, which are commonly used in ecology to study the fate of spatially extended natural populations. We propose new…
Does an ecological community allow stable coexistence? Identifying the general principles that determine the answer to this question is a central problem of theoretical ecology. Random matrix theory approaches have uncovered the general…
Most population models assume that individuals within a given population are identical, that is, the fundamental role of variation is ignored. Inhomogeneous models of populations and communities allow for birth and death rates to vary among…
Over the past century, nonlinear difference and differential equations have been used to understand conditions for species coexistence. However, these models fail to account for random fluctuations due to demographic and environmental…
In many natural situations one observes a local system with many competing species which is coupled by weak immigration to a regional species pool. The dynamics of such a system is dominated by its stable and uninvadable (SU) states. When…
We consider a general, neutral, dynamical model of biodiversity. Individuals have i.i.d. lifetime durations, which are not necessarily exponentially distributed, and each individual gives birth independently at constant rate \lambda. We…
Community ecology has traditionally relied on the competitive exclusion principle, a piece of common wisdom in conceptual frameworks developed to describe species assemblages. Key concepts in community ecology, such as limiting similarity…
We introduce a model designed to account for the influence of a line with fast diffusion-such as a road or another transport network-on the dynamics of a population in an ecological niche. This model consists of a system of coupled…
Statistical inference on biodiversity has a rich history going back to RA Fisher. An influential ecological theory suggests the existence of a fundamental biodiversity number, denoted $\alpha$, which coincides with the precision parameter…
The controversy concerning both the definition of the species and methods for inferring the boundaries and numbers of species has occupied biologists for centuries, and the debate itself has become known as the species problem. The modern…
We analyze several florae (collections of plant species populating specific areas) in different geographic and climatic regions. For every list of species we produce a taxonomic classification tree and we consider its statistical…
There have been many studies to examine whether one trait is correlated with another trait across a group of present-day species (for example, do species with larger brains tend to have longer gestation times. Since the introduction of the…
The origin of diversification and coexistence of genes and species have been traditionally studied in isolated biological levels. Ecological and evolutionary views have focused on the mechanisms that enable or constrain species coexistence,…
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…
We describe a simple model of evolution which incorporates the branching and extinction of species lines, and also includes abiotic influences. A first principles approach is taken in which the probability for speciation and extinction are…
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…
This paper investigates the influence of environmental noise on the characteristic timescale of the dynamics of density-dependent populations. General results are obtained on the statistics of time spent in rarity and time spent in…
Following some recent works, we investigate the problem of optimising the total population size for logistic diffusive models with respect to resources distributions. Using the spatially heterogeneous Fisher-KPP equation, we obtain a…
The advent of modern genome sequencing techniques allows for a more stringent test of the neutrality hypothesis of Darwinian evolution, where all individuals have the same fitness. Using the individual based model of Wright and Fisher, we…
An analytical approximation is derived for the Zero Sum Multinomial distribution which gives the Species Abundance Distribution in Neutral Community Models. The obtained distribution function describes well computer simulation results on…