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Identifying undocumented or potential future interactions among species is a challenge facing modern ecologists. Recent link prediction methods rely on trait data, however large species interaction databases are typically sparse and…
People tend to have their social interactions with members of their own community. Such group-structured interactions can have a profound impact on the behaviors that evolve. Group structure affects the way people cooperate, and how they…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
In many indigenous societies, people are categorised into several cultural groups, or clans, within which they believe to share ancestors. Clan attributions provide certain rules for marriage and descent. Such rules between clans constitute…
The far-reaching consequences of ecological interactions in the dynamics of biological communities remain an intriguing subject. For decades, competition has been a cornerstone in ecological processes, but mounting evidence shows that…
More than any other species, humans form social ties to individuals who are neither kin nor mates, and these ties tend to be with similar people. Here, we show that this similarity extends to genotypes. Across the whole genome, friends'…
Numerical models indicate that collective animal behaviour may emerge from simple local rules of interaction among the individuals. However, very little is known about the nature of such interaction, so that models and theories mostly rely…
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…
Does an ecological community allow stable coexistence? Identifying the general principles that determine the answer to this question is a central problem of theoretical ecology. Random matrix theory approaches have uncovered the general…
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…
The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits…
Coexistence of individuals with different species or phenotypes is often found in nature in spite of competition between them. Stable coexistence of multiple types of individuals have implications for maintenance of ecological biodiversity…
Evolutionary relationships between species are usually represented in phylogenies, i.e. evolutionary trees, which are a type of networks. The terminal nodes of these trees represent species, which are made of individuals and populations…
Synergistic and antagonistic interactions in multi-species populations - such as resource sharing and competition - result in remarkably diverse behaviors in populations of interacting cells, such as in soil or human microbiomes, or clonal…
A mutualism is an interaction where the involved species benefit from each other. We study a two-dimensional hexagonal three-state cellular automaton model of a two-species mutualistic system. The simple model is characterized by four…
Flocking is a fascinating phenomenon observed across a wide range of living organisms. We investigate, based on a simple self-propelled particle model, how the emergence of ordered motion in a collectively moving group is influenced by the…
A hierarchical structure describing the inter-relationships of species has long been a fundamental concept in systematic biology, from Linnean classification through to the more recent quest for a 'Tree of Life.' In this paper we use an…
Mutualistic networks have attracted increasing attention in the ecological literature in the last decades as they play a key role in the maintenance of biodiversity. Here, we develop an analytical framework to study the structural stability…
The Tangled Nature Model of biological and cultural evolution features interacting agents which compete for limited resources and reproduce in an error prone fashion and at a rate depending on the `tangle' of interactions they maintain with…
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…