Related papers: Biodiversity on island chains: neutral model simul…

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…

Models in evolutionary game theory traditionally assume symmetric interactions in homogeneous environments. Here, we consider populations evolving in a heterogeneous environment, which consists of patches of different qualities that are…

Population dynamics is constrained by the environment, which needs to obey certain conditions to support population growth. We consider a standard model for the evolution of a single species population density, that includes reproduction,…

To understand the biodiversity of an ecosystem cannot be understood by solely analyzing the pair relations of competing species. Instead, we should consider multi-point interactions because the presence of a third party could change the…

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…

Ecosystems often undergo abrupt regime shifts in response to gradual external changes. These shifts are theoretically understood as a regime switch between alternative stable states of the ecosystem dynamical response to smooth changes in…

Nowadays, evidence is mounting that the race of living organisms for adaptation to the chemicals synthesized by their neighbours may drive community structures. Particularly, some bacterial infections and plant invasions disruptive of the…

Neutral evolution assumes that there are no selective forces distinguishing different variants in a population. Despite this striking assumption, many recent studies have sought to assess whether neutrality can provide a good description of…

Ecological networks allow us to study the structure and function of ecosystems and gain insights on species resilience/stability. The study of this ecological networks is usually a snapshop focused in a limited specific range of space and…

Similarity of competitors has been proposed to facilitate coexistence of species because it slows down competitive exclusion, thus making it easier for equalizing mechanisms to maintain diverse communities. On the other hand, chaos can…

We study analytically and numerically a model metabolic cycle composed of an arbitrary number of species of catalytically active particles. Each species converts a substrate into a product, the latter being used as the substrate by the next…

Nestedness is a property of interaction networks widely observed in natural mutualistic communities. Despite a widespread interest on this pattern, no general consensus exists on how to measure it. Instead, several metrics aiming at…

By creating networks of biochemical pathways, communities of micro-organisms are able to modulate the properties of their environment and even the metabolic processes within their hosts. Next-generation high-throughput sequencing has led to…

We study two models of population with migration. We assume that we are given infinitely many islands with the same number r of resources, each individual consuming one unit of resources. On an island lives an individual whose genealogy is…

Ecosystems can undergo sudden shifts to undesirable states, but recent studies with simple single species ecosystems have demonstrated that advance warning can be provided by the slowing down of population dynamics near a tipping point.…

If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…

Quantifying diversity is of central importance for the study of structure, function and evolution of microbial communities. The estimation of microbial diversity has received renewed attention with the advent of large-scale metagenomic…

In a complex system, the individual components are neither so tightly coupled or correlated that they can all be treated as a single unit, nor so uncorrelated that they can be approximated as independent entities. Instead, patterns of…

Uncovering structural properties of ecological networks is a crucial starting point of studying the system's stability in response to various types of perturbations. We analyze pollination and seed disposal networks, which are…

The spatial dispersal of individuals is known to play an important role in the dynamics of populations, and is central to metapopulation theory. At the same time, local adaptation to environmental conditions creates a geographic mosaic of…