Related papers: Phylogenetic Proximity and Nestedness in Mutualist…

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…

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…

Phylogenetics is the study of the evolutionary relationships between organisms. One of the main challenges in the field is to take biological data for a group of organisms and to infer an evolutionary tree, a graph that represents these…

The assembly of ecological communities from a pool of species is central to ecology, but the effect of this process on properties of community interaction networks is still largely unknown. Here, we use a systematic analytical framework to…

We study a stochastic individual-based model of interacting plant and pollinator species through a bipartite graph: each species is a node of the graph, an edge representing interactions between a pair of species. The dynamics of the system…

Ecologists have long suspected that species are more likely to interact if their traits match in a particular way. For example, a pollination interaction may be more likely if the proportions of a bee's tongue fit a plant's flower shape.…

The persistence of biodiversity of species is a challenging proposition in ecological communities in the face of Darwinian selection. The present article investigates beyond the pairwise competitive interactions and provides a novel…

Many organisms exhibit branching morphologies that twist around each other and become entangled. Entanglement occurs when different objects interlock, creating complex and often irreversible configurations. This physical phenomenon is…

Metagenomics provides a powerful new tool set for investigating evolutionary interactions with the environment. However, an absence of model-based statistical methods means that researchers are often not able to make full use of this…

Numerical models indicate that collective animal behaviour may emerge from simple local rules of interaction among the individuals. However, very little is known about the nature of such interaction, so that models and theories mostly rely…

A hierarchical structure describing the inter-relationships of species has long been a fundamental concept in systematic biology, from Linnean classification through to the more recent quest for a 'Tree of Life.' In this paper we use an…

A recent paper by James et al. finds that mutualistic interactions decrease the biodiversity of model ecosystems. However, this result can be reverted if we consider ecological trade-offs and choose parameters suitable for sparse…

How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…

Flocking is a fascinating phenomenon observed across a wide range of living organisms. We investigate, based on a simple self-propelled particle model, how the emergence of ordered motion in a collectively moving group is influenced by the…

Understanding the dynamics of genome rearrangements is a major issue of phylogenetics. Phylogenetics is the study of species evolution. A major goal of the field is to establish evolutionary relationships within groups of species, in order…

People tend to have their social interactions with members of their own community. Such group-structured interactions can have a profound impact on the behaviors that evolve. Group structure affects the way people cooperate, and how they…

The concept of nestedness, in particular for ecological and economical networks, has been introduced as a structural characteristic of real interacting systems. We suggest that the nestedness is in fact another way to express a mesoscale…

Mutualistic networks have attracted increasing attention in the ecological literature in the last decades as they play a key role in the maintenance of biodiversity. Here, we develop an analytical framework to study the structural stability…

Kin selection and direct reciprocity are two most basic mechanisms for promoting cooperation in human society. Generalizing the standard models of the multi-player Prisoner's Dilemma and the Public Goods games for heterogeneous populations,…

In contrast to dyadic interactions, higher-order interactions may contain one another, with subgroups naturally embedded within larger groups. These containment patterns arise empirically in ecology, sociology, computer science and the…