Related papers: Nested structure acquired through simple evolution…
Mutualistic networks have been shown to involve complex patterns of interactions among animal and plant species. The architecture of these webs seems to pervade some of their robust and fragile behaviour. Recent work indicates that there is…
Mutualistic networks are formed when the interactions between two classes of species are mutually beneficial. They are important examples of cooperation shaped by evolution. Mutualism between animals and plants plays a key role in the…
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…
The observed architecture of ecological and socio-economic networks differs significantly from that of random networks. From a network science standpoint, non-random structural patterns observed in real networks call for an explanation of…
Interactions are ubiquitous across biological systems. These interactions can be abstracted as patterns of connections among distinct units such as genes, proteins, individual organisms, or species which form a hierarchy of biological…
Nestedness is a common property of communication, finance, trade, and ecological networks. In networks with high levels of nestedness, the link positions of low-degree nodes (those with few links) form nested subsets of the link positions…
Living organisms produce metabolites of many types via their metabolisms. Especially, flavonoids, a kind of secondary metabolites, of plant species are interesting examples. Since plant species are believed to have specific flavonoids with…
Evolution produces complex and structured networks of interacting components in chemical, biological, and social systems. We describe a simple mathematical model for the evolution of an idealized chemical system to study how a network of…
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…
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…
We study the evolution of the network properties of a populated network embedded in a genotype space characterised by either a low or a high number of potential links, with particular emphasis on the connectivity and clustering. Evolution…
Understanding the architectural subtleties of ecological networks, believed to confer them enhanced stability and robustness, is a subject of outmost relevance. Mutualistic interactions have been profusely studied and their corresponding…
We analyze a model of interacting agents (e.g. prebiotic chemical species) which are represended by nodes of a network, whereas their interactions are mapped onto directed links between these nodes. On a fast time scale, each agent follows…
It has been observed that mutualistic bipartite networks have a nested structure of interactions. In addition, the degree distributions associated with the two guilds involved in such networks (e.g. plants & pollinators or plants & seed…
We investigate how the pattern of contacts between species in mutualistic ecosystems is affected by the phylogenetic proximity between the species of each guild. We develop several theoretical tools to measure that effect and we use them to…
We use a generalised version of the individual-based Tangled Nature model of evolutionary ecology to study the relationship between ecosystem structure and evolutionary history. Our evolved model ecosystems typically exhibit interaction…
Community ecologists are principally occupied with the proposition that natural assemblages of species exhibit orderliness and with identifying its causes. Plant-pollinator networks exhibit a variety of orderly properties, one of which is…
The discourse surrounding the structural organization of mutualistic interactions mostly revolves around modularity and nestedness. The former is known to enhance the stability of communities, while the latter is related to their…
We investigate how the pattern of contacts between species in mutualistic ecosystems is affected by the phylogenetic proximity between the species of each guild. We develop a dynamical model geared to establish the role of such proximity in…
It is well-known that population structure is a catalyst for the evolution of cooperation since individuals can reciprocate with their neighbors through local interactions defined by network structures. Previous research typically relies on…