Related papers: A niche remedy for the dynamical problems of neutr…
Hubbell's neutral theory of biodiversity has successfully explained the observed composition of many ecological communities but it relies on strict demographic equivalence among species and provides no room for evolutionary processes like…
Understanding the forces shaping ecological communities is crucially important to basic science and conservation. In recent years, considerable progress was made in explaining communities using simple and general models, with neutral theory…
A central issue in ecology today is that of the factors determining the relative abundance of species within a natural community. The proper application of the principles of statistical physics to the problem of species abundance…
We introduce the first analytical model of asymmetric community dynamics to yield Hubbell's neutral theory in the limit of functional equivalence among all species. Our focus centers on an asymmetric extension of Hubbell's local community…
The simplest theories often have much merit and many limitations, and in this vein, the value of Neutral Theory (NT) has been the subject of much debate over the past 15 years. NT was proposed at the turn of the century by Stephen Hubbell…
Recent theoretical approaches to community structure and dynamics reveal that many large-scale features of community structure (such as species-rank distributions and species-area relations) can be explained by a so-called neutral model.…
Neutral dynamics, where taxa are assumed to be demographically equivalent and their abundance is governed solely by the stochasticity of the underlying birth-death process, has proved itself as an important minimal model that accounts for…
We develop an theoretical approach for predicting biodiversity in multi-dimensional niche spaces, arising due to ecological drivers such as competitive exclusion. The novelty of our approach relies on the fact that ecological niches are…
We study a stochastic community model able to interpolate from a neutral regime to a niche partitioned regime upon varying a single parameter tuning the intensity of niche stabilization, namely the difference between intraspecific and…
The evolutionary and ecological processes behind the origin of species are among the most fundamental problems in biology. In fact, many theoretical hypothesis on different type of speciation have been proposed. In particular, models of…
Niche and neutral theory are two prevailing, yet much debated, ideas in ecology proposed to explain the patterns of biodiversity. Whereas niche theory emphasizes selective differences between species and interspecific interactions in…
Neutral theories have played a crucial and revolutionary role in fields such as population genetics and biogeography. These theories are critical by definition, in the sense that the overall growth rate of each single allele/species/type…
Neutral models which assume ecological equivalence between species provide null models for community assembly. In Hubbell's Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity (UNTB), many local communities are connected to a single metacommunity…
One of the first successes of neutral ecology was to predict realistically-broad distributions of rare and abundant species. However, it has remained an outstanding theoretical challenge to describe how this distribution of abundances…
Neutral models for the dynamics of a system of competing species are used, nowadays, to describe a wide variety of empirical communities. These models are used in many situations, ranging from population genetics and ecological biodiversity…
How ecosystems respond to environmental perturbations is a fundamental question in ecology, made especially challenging due to the strong coupling between species and their environment. Here, we introduce a theoretical framework for…
In both natural and artificial studies, evolution is often seen as synonymous to natural selection. Individuals evolve under pressures set by environments that are either reset or do not carry over significant changes from previous…
Neutral models, in which individual agents with equal fitness undergo a birth-death-mutation process, are very popular in population genetics and community ecology. Usually these models are applied to populations and communities with…
Mutualistic interactions are vital constituents of ecological and socio-economic systems. Empirical studies have found that the patterns of reciprocal relations among the participants often shows the salient features of being simultaneously…
Understanding the relationship between complexity and stability in large dynamical systems -- such as ecosystems -- remains a key open question in complexity theory which has inspired a rich body of work developed over more than fifty…