Related papers: Phylogenetic Proximity and Nestedness in Mutualist…
Current theories about mechanisms promoting species co-existence in diverse communities assume that species only interact ecologically. Species are treated as discrete evolutionary entities, even though abundant empirical evidence indicates…
Diversity is a fundamental feature of ecosystems, even when the concept of ecosystem is extended to sociology or economics. Diversity can be intended as the count of different items, animals, or, more generally, interactions. There are two…
In the last years, a remarkable theoretical effort has been made in order to understand stability and complexity in ecological communities. The non-random structures of real ecological interaction networks has been recognized as one key…
Understanding the causes and effects of network structural features is a key task in deciphering complex systems. In this context, the property of network nestedness has aroused a fair amount of interest as regards ecological networks.…
Phylogenetic networks generalise phylogenetic trees and allow for the accurate representation of the evolutionary history of a set of present-day species whose past includes reticulate events such as hybridisation and lateral gene transfer.…
Identifying undocumented or potential future interactions among species is a challenge facing modern ecologists. Recent link prediction methods rely on trait data, however large species interaction databases are typically sparse and…
How does social complexity depend on population size and cultural transmission? Kinship structures in traditional societies provide a fundamental illustration, where cultural rules between clans determine people's marriage possibilities.…
Microbial communities harbor extensive fine-scale diversity: closely-related strains of the same species coexist alongside many distantly-related taxa. Yet strain coexistence remains poorly understood, largely because most studies neglect…
Evolutionary relationships between species are usually represented in phylogenies, i.e. evolutionary trees, which are a type of networks. The terminal nodes of these trees represent species, which are made of individuals and populations…
The discourse surrounding the structural organization of mutualistic interactions mostly revolves around modularity and nestedness. The former is known to enhance the stability of communities, while the latter is related to their…
Phylogenetic networks which are, as opposed to trees, suitable to describe processes like hybridization and horizontal gene transfer, play a substantial role in evolutionary research. However, while non-treelike events need to be taken into…
Tree-based networks are a class of phylogenetic networks that attempt to formally capture what is meant by "tree-like" evolution. A given non-tree-based phylogenetic network, however, might appear to be very close to being tree-based, or…
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…
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…
How large ecosystems can create and maintain the remarkable biodiversity we see in nature is probably one of the biggest open questions in science, attracting attention from different fields, from Theoretical Ecology to Mathematics and…
A mutualism is an interaction where the involved species benefit from each other. We study a two-dimensional hexagonal three-state cellular automaton model of a two-species mutualistic system. The simple model is characterized by four…
Synergistic and antagonistic interactions in multi-species populations - such as resource sharing and competition - result in remarkably diverse behaviors in populations of interacting cells, such as in soil or human microbiomes, or clonal…
Plant-pollinator mutualistic networks are asymmetric in their interactions: specialist plants are pollinated by generalist animals, while generalist plants are pollinated by a broad involving specialists and generalists. It has been…
Mutualism is a biological interaction mutually beneficial for both species involved, such as the interaction between plants and their pollinators. Real mutualistic communities can be understood as weighted bipartite networks and they…
A new model ecosystem consisting of many interacting species is introduced. The species are connected through a random matrix with a given connectivity. It is shown that the system is organized close to a boundary of marginal stability in…