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Mutualisms are key for structuring ecological communities, but they are sensitive to environmental change and fluctuations in population size. Consequently, how mutualisms achieve stability remains an open question in ecological theory.…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2026-05-08 Matheus Bongestab , David Pinto-Ramos , Ricardo Martinez-Garcia

Identifying stabilizing factors in foodwebs is a long standing challenge with wide implications for community ecology and conservation. Here, we investigate the stability of spatially resolved meta-foodwebs with far-ranging super-predators…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2019-09-13 Andreas Brechtel , Thilo Gross , Barbara Drossel

The networks of predator-prey interactions in ecological systems are remarkably complex, but nevertheless surprisingly stable in terms of long term persistence of the system as a whole. In order to understand the mechanism driving the…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2015-06-05 Korinna T. Allhoff , Daniel Ritterskamp , Björn C. Rall , Barbara Drossel , Christian Guill

Understanding the stability of complex communities is a central focus in ecology, many important theoretical advancements have been made to identify drivers of ecological stability. However, previous results often rely on the…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2025-04-04 Shuaiying Wang , Yuguang Yang , Aming Li

Randomly-assembled dynamical systems are theoretically predicted to be unstable upon crossing a critical threshold of complexity, as first shown by May. Yet, empirical complex systems exhibit remarkable stability, indicating the presence of…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-03-31 Francesco Ferraro , Christian Grilletta , Amos Maritan , Samir Suweis , Sandro Azaele

We analyse the stability of linear dynamical systems defined on sparse, random graphs with predator-prey, competitive, and mutualistic interactions. These systems are aimed at modelling the stability of fixed points in large systems defined…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-01-30 Andrea Marcello Mambuca , Chiara Cammarota , Izaak Neri

Mutualistic interactions, which are beneficial for both interacting species, are recurrently present in ecosystems. Observations of natural systems showed that, if we draw mutualistic relationships as binary links between species, the…

Physics and Society · Physics 2019-08-21 Clàudia Payrató Borrás , Laura Hernández , Yamir Moreno

Similarity of competitors has been proposed to facilitate coexistence of species because it slows down competitive exclusion, thus making it easier for equalizing mechanisms to maintain diverse communities. On the other hand, chaos can…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2019-02-27 Pablo Rodríguez-Sánchez , Egbert H. van Nes , Marten Scheffer

Individual species may experience diverse outcomes, from prosperity to extinction, in an ecological community subject to external and internal variations. Despite the wealth of theoretical results derived from random matrix ensembles, a…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2024-06-12 Andrus Giraldo , Deok-Sun Lee

Previous work has shown that species interacting in an ecosystem and actors transacting in an economic context may have notable similarities in behavior. However, the specific mechanism that may underlie similarities in nature and human…

Physics and Society · Physics 2011-10-04 Serguei Saavedra , Felix Reed-Tsochas , Brian Uzzi

Systems composed of distinct complex networks are present in many real-world environments, from society to ecological systems. In the present paper, we propose a network model obtained as a consequence of interactions between two species…

Biological Physics · Physics 2007-08-08 Luis Enrique Correa da Rocha , Luciano da Fontoura Costa

Metacommunity theory is considered a promising approach for explaining species diversity and food web complexity. Recently Pillai et al. proposed a simple modeling framework for the dynamics of food webs at the metacommunity level. Here, we…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2012-12-21 Gesa A. Böhme , Thilo Gross

We investigate the relationship between the nested organization of mutualistic systems and their robustness against the extinction of species. We establish that a nested pattern of contacts is the best possible one as far as robustness is…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2007-09-20 E. Burgos , H. Ceva , R. Perazzo , M. Devoto , D. Medan , M. Zimmermann , A. M. Delbue

Preserving biodiversity and ecosystem stability is a challenge that can be pursued through modern statistical mechanics modeling. Here we introduce a variational maximum entropy-based algorithm to evaluate the entropy in a minimal ecosystem…

Biological Physics · Physics 2018-10-17 Mattia Miotto , Lorenzo Monacelli

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…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2018-05-18 Chengyi Tu , Samir Suweis , Jacopo Grillib , Marco Formentin , Amos Maritan

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…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2018-05-21 Chengyi Tu , Samir Suweis , Jacopo Grilli , Marco Formentin , Amos Maritan

Ecological networks describe the interactions between different species, informing us of how they rely on one another for food, pollination and survival. If a species in an ecosystem is under threat of extinction, it can affect other…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2023-07-06 Chris Jones , Damaris Zurell , Karoline Wiesner

Global environmental change is affecting species distribution and their interactions with other species. In particular, the main drivers of environmental change strongly affect the strength of interspecific interactions with considerable…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2013-08-19 Serguei Saavedra , Rudolf P. Rohr , Vasilis Dakos , Jordi Bascompte

Formation and competition of associations are studied in a six-species ecological model where each species has two predators and two prey. Each site of a square lattice is occupied by an individual belonging to one of the six species. The…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2008-08-26 G. Szabo , A. Szolnoki , I. Borsos

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…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2022-11-09 Sourin Chatterjee , Sayantan Nag Chowdhury , Dibakar Ghosh , Chittaranjan Hens