Related papers: Persistence in fluctuating environments
Individuals within any species exhibit differences in size, developmental state, or spatial location. These differences coupled with environmental fluctuations in demographic rates can have subtle effects on population persistence and…
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…
Empirical observations show that ecological communities can have a huge number of coexisting species, also with few or limited number of resources. These ecosystems are characterized by multiple type of interactions, in particular…
Empirical observations show that ecological communities can have a huge number of coexisting species, also with few or limited number of resources. These ecosystems are characterized by multiple type of interactions, in particular…
The dynamics of species' densities depend both on internal and external variables. Internal variables include frequencies of individuals exhibiting different phenotypes or living in different spatial locations. External variables include…
Populations of competing biological species exhibit a fascinating interplay between the nonlinear dynamics of evolutionary selection forces and random fluctuations arising from the stochastic nature of the interactions. The processes…
Explaining coexistence in species-rich communities of primary producers remains a challenge for ecologists because of their likely competition for shared resources. Following Hutchinson's seminal suggestion, many theoreticians have tried to…
We analyze a general theory for coexistence and extinction of ecological communities that are influenced by stochastic temporal environmental fluctuations. The results apply to discrete time (stochastic difference equations), continuous…
Understanding under what conditions populations, whether they be plants, animals, or viral particles, persist is an issue of theoretical and practical importance in population biology. Both biotic interactions and environmental fluctuations…
Populations interact non-linearly and are influenced by environmental fluctuations. In order to have realistic mathematical models, one needs to take into account that the environmental fluctuations are inherently stochastic. Often,…
We introduce an individual-based model of a complex ecological community with random interactions. The model contains a large number of species, each with a finite population of individuals, subject to discrete reproduction and death…
In contrast to the neutral population cycles of the deterministic mean-field Lotka--Volterra rate equations, including spatial structure and stochastic noise in models for predator-prey interactions yields complex spatio-temporal structures…
Ecologists have put forward many explanations for coexistence, but these are only partial explanations; nature is complex, so it is reasonable to assume that in any given ecological community, multiple mechanisms of coexistence are…
Noise, through its interaction with the nonlinearity of the living systems, can give rise to counter-intuitive phenomena such as stochastic resonance, noise-delayed extinction, temporal oscillations, and spatial patterns. In this paper we…
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…
Frequency dependent selection and demographic fluctuations play important roles in evolutionary and ecological processes. Under frequency dependent selection, the average fitness of the population may increase or decrease based on…
Spatially extended population dynamics models that incorporate intrinsic noise serve as case studies for the role of fluctuations and correlations in biological systems. Including spatial structure and stochastic noise in predator-prey…
In recent years there has been a growing interest in the study of the dynamics of stochastic populations. A key question in population biology is to understand the conditions under which populations coexist or go extinct. Theoretical and…
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…
Classical ecological models predict that large, diverse communities should be unstable, presenting a central challenge to explaining the stable biodiversity seen in nature. We revisit this long-standing problem by extending the generalized…