Related papers: Rescuing ecosystems from extinction cascades throu…

Despite tremendous interest in the topic and decades of research, the origins of the major losses of biodiversity in the history of life on Earth remain elusive. A variety of possible causes for these mass-extinction events have been…

We introduce an evolutionary metacommunity of multitrophic food webs on several habitats coupled by migration. In contrast to previous studies that focus either on evolutionary or on spatial aspects, we include both and investigate the…

We investigate in detail the model of a trophic web proposed by Amaral and Meyer [Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 652 (1999)]. We focused on small-size systems that are relevant for real biological food webs and for which the fluctuations are playing…

We investigate how perturbations propagate up and down a food chain with and without self-interaction and omnivory. A source of perturbation is a shift in death rate of a trophic level, and the measure of perturbation is the difference…

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…

Population genetics struggles to model extinction; standard models track the relative rather than absolute fitness of genotypes, while the exceptions describe only the short-term transition from imminent doom to evolutionary rescue. But…

We review recent work aimed at modeling species extinction over geological time. We discuss a number of models which, rather than dealing with the direct causes of particular extinction events, attempt to predict overall statistical trends,…

The robustness of an ecological network quantifies the resilience of the ecosystem it represents to species loss. It corresponds to the proportion of species that are disconnected from the rest of the network when extinctions occur…

Quantifying population dynamics is a fundamental challenge in ecology and evolutionary biology, particularly for species that are cryptic, microscopic, or extinct. Traditional approaches rely on continuous representations of population…

In ecology it is widely recognised that many landscapes comprise a network of discrete patches of habitat. The species that inhabit the patches interact with each other through a foodweb, the network of feeding interactions. The…

The complexity of an ecological community can be distilled into a network, where diverse interactions connect species in a web of dependencies. Species interact not only with each other but indirectly through environmental effects, however…

Complex diseases can be modeled as damage to intracellular networks that results in abnormal cell behaviors. Network-based dynamic models such as Boolean models have been employed to model a variety of biological systems including those…

Two density-dependent branching processes are considered to model predator-prey populations. For both models, preys are considered to be the main food supply of predators. Moreover, in each generation the number of individuals of each…

Transformations to create more sustainable social-ecological systems are urgently needed. Structural change is a feature of transformations of social-ecological systems that is of critical importance but is little understood. Here, we…

The stability of ecosystems as well as the relation between topology and dynamics on multilayer networks are important questions that are usually discussed in separate communities. Here, we combine these two topics by investigating the…

How do landscape fragmentation affects ecosystems diversity and stability is an important and complex question in ecology with no simple answer, as spatially separated habitats where species live are highly dynamic rather than just static.…

According to the competitive exclusion principle, in a finite ecosystem, extinction occurs naturally when two or more species compete for the same resources. An important question that arises is: when coexistence is not possible, which…

This is the second of two papers dedicated to the relationship between population models of competition and biodiversity. Here we consider species assembly models where the population dynamics is kept far from fixed points through the…

Several theoretical models predict that spatial patterning increases ecosystem resilience. However, these predictions rely on simplifying assumptions, such as assuming isotropic and infinitely large ecosystems, and empirical evidence…

Carnivores interact with herbivores to indirectly impact plant populations, creating trophic cascades within plant-herbivore-carnivore systems. We developed and analyzed a food chain model to gain a mechanistic understanding of the critical…