Related papers: Does Phylogenetic Proximity Explain Nestedness in …
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…
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…
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…
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, where individuals from different species can benefit from each other, are widespread across ecosystems. This study develops a general deterministic model of mutualism involving two populations, assuming that…
The foundational concepts behind the persistence of ecological communities have been based on two ecological properties: dynamical stability and feasibility. The former is typically regarded as the capacity of a community to return to an…
Nested structure, which is non-random, controls cooperation dynamics and biodiversity in plant-animal mutualistic networks. This structural pattern has been explained in a static (non-growth) network models. However, evolutionary processes…
Relations among species in ecosystems can be represented by complex networks where both negative (competition) and positive (mutualism) interactions are concurrently present. Recently, it has been shown that many ecosystems can be cast into…
Species' interactions are shaped by their traits. Thus, we expect traits -- in particular, trait (dis)similarity -- to play a central role in determining whether a particular set of species coexists. Traits are, in turn, the outcome of an…
Nestedness characterizes the linkage pattern of networked systems, indicating the likelihood that a node is linked to the nodes linked to the nodes with larger degrees than it. Networks of mutualistic relationship between distinct groups of…
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…
The role of species interactions in controlling the interplay between the stability of an ecosystem and its biodiversity is still not well understood. The ability of ecological communities to recover after a small perturbation of the…
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…
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…
Many organisms live in populations structured by space and by class, exhibit plastic responses to their social partners, and are subject to non-additive ecological and fitness effects. Social evolution theory has long recognized that all of…
We suggest a novel approach to treating symbiotic relations between biological species or social entities. The main idea is the characterisation of symbiotic relations of coexisting species through their mutual influence on their respective…
In this work we present a dynamical model that succesfully describes the organization of mutualistic ecological systems. The main characteristic of these systems is the nested structure of the bipartite adjacency matrix describing their…
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…
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…