Related papers: Stability Criteria for Complex Ecosystems
A central concern of community ecology is the interdependence between interaction strengths and the underlying structure of the network upon which species interact. In this work we present a solvable example of such a feedback mechanism in…
According to the criticality hypothesis, collective biological systems should operate in a special parameter region, close to so-called critical points, where the collective behavior undergoes a qualitative change between different…
Ecological systems are complex dynamical systems. Modelling efforts on ecosystems' dynamical stability have revealed that population dynamics, being highly nonlinear, can be governed by complex fluctuations. Indeed, experimental and field…
Predators often consume multiple prey and by mutually subsidizing a shared predator, the prey may reciprocally harm each other. When predation levels are high, this apparent competition can culminate in a prey species being displaced.…
In this work we have used computer models of social-like networks to show by extensive numerical simulations that cooperation in evolutionary games can emerge and be stable on this class of networks. The amounts of cooperation reached are…
The stable functionality of networked systems is a hallmark of their natural ability to coordinate between their multiple interacting components. Yet, strikingly, real-world networks seem random and highly irregular, apparently lacking any…
In food webs, many interacting species coexist despite the restrictions imposed by the competitive exclusion principle and apparent competition. For the generalized Lotka-Volterra equations, sustainable coexistence necessitates nonzero…
Microbial communities routinely have several alternative stable states observed for the same environmental parameters. Sudden and irreversible transitions between these states make external manipulation of these systems more complicated. To…
Competitive interactions represent one of the driving forces behind evolution and natural selection in biological and sociological systems. For example, animals in an ecosystem may vie for food or mates; in a market economy, firms may…
The dynamical mechanisms that can stabilize the coexistence of species (or strategies) are of substantial interest for the maintenance of biodiversity and in sociobehavioural dynamics. We investigate the mean extinction time in the…
In this paper we study the long term dynamics of two prey species and one predator species. In the deterministic setting, if we assume the interactions are of Lotka-Volterra type (competition or predation), the long term behavior of this…
We investigate global stability and dynamics of large ecological networks by classical methods of the dynamical system theory, including Hamiltonian methods, and averaging. Our analysis exploits the network topological structure, namely,…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
The stability of a complex system generally decreases with increasing system size and interconnectivity, a counterintuitive result of widespread importance across the physical, life, and social sciences. Despite recent interest in the…
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…
A delayed, discrete-time, prey-predator model with Allee effects imposed on prey and predator populations is defined, and dynamics of the system is characterized computationally. The parametric conditions for local asymptotic stability of…
This paper will introduce a theory of emergent animal social complexity using various results from computational models and empirical results. These results will be organized into a vertical model of social complexity. This will support the…
Microorganisms live in environments that inevitably fluctuate between mild and harsh conditions. As harsh conditions may cause extinctions, the rate at which fluctuations occur can shape microbial communities and their diversity, but we…
Random matrix theory successfully connects the structure of interactions of large ecological communities to their ability to respond to perturbations. One of the most debated aspects of this approach is the missing role of population…
Uncovering structural properties of ecological networks is a crucial starting point of studying the system's stability in response to various types of perturbations. We analyze pollination and seed disposal networks, which are…