Related papers: Threshold Extinction in Food Webs
For many taxa, the current high rates of extinction are likely to result in a significant loss of biodiversity. The evolutionary heritage of biodiversity is frequently quantified by a measure called phylogenetic diversity (PD). We predict…
Species sharing a habitat will co-evolve to make use of the available resources, as consumption is modulated by competition and negative feedback loops between consumers and resources. The dietary range of a given species determines the…
Ecological systems are emergent features of ecological and adaptive dynamics of a community of interacting species. By natural selection through the abiotic environment and by co-adaptation within the community, species evolve, thereby…
We present novel analytical results about ecosystem species diversity that stem from a proposed coarse grained neutral model based on birth-death processes. The relevance of the problem lies in the urgency for understanding and synthesizing…
We report the results of carrying out a large number of simulations on a coevolutionary model of multispecies communities. A wide range of parameter values were investigated which allowed a rather complete picture of the change in behaviour…
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…
Data acquisition in animal ecology is rapidly accelerating due to inexpensive and accessible sensors such as smartphones, drones, satellites, audio recorders and bio-logging devices. These new technologies and the data they generate hold…
A wide variety of stochastic models of cladogenesis (based on speciation and extinction) lead to an identical distribution on phylogenetic tree shapes once the edge lengths are ignored. By contrast, the distribution of the tree's edge…
In previous work, I have developed an information theoretic complexity measure of networks. When applied to several real world food webs, there is a distinct difference in complexity between the real food web, and randomised control…
We analyze the properties of model food webs and of fifteen community food webs from a variety of environments. We first perform a theoretical analysis of the niche model of Williams and Martinez. We derive analytical expressions for the…
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…
In group foraging situations, the conventional expectation is that increased food availability would enhance consumption, especially when animals prioritize maximizing their food intake. This paper challenges this conventional wisdom by…
The myriad microscopic interactions among the individual organisms that constitute an ecological system collectively give rise, at the macroscopic scale, to evolutionary trends. The ability to detect the directionality of such trends is…
Phylogenetic trees represent certain species and their likely ancestors. In such a tree, present-day species are leaves and an edge from u to v indicates that u is an ancestor of v. Weights on these edges indicate the phylogenetic distance.…
In this paper, we study extinction in dynamical systems generated by reaction networks. We introduce two notions: weak extinction and strong extinction, and relate them to the structure of the underlying network through Lyapunov functions…
Ecosystems are commonly organized into trophic levels -- organisms that occupy the same level in a food chain (e.g., plants, herbivores, carnivores). A fundamental question in theoretical ecology is how the interplay between trophic…
Ecological networks exhibit non-random structural patterns, such as modularity and nestedness, which indicate ecosystem stability, species diversity, and connectance. Such structure-stability relationships are well known. However, another…
If predictions for species extinctions hold, then the `tree of life' today may be quite different to that in (say) 100 years. We describe a technique to quantify how much each species is likely to contribute to future biodiversity, as…
We have generalized our ``unified'' model of evolutionary ecology by taking into account the possible movements of the organisms from one ``patch'' to another within the same eco-system. We model the spatial extension of the eco-system…
Type 1a supernova magnitudes conventionally include an additive parameter called the extinction coefficient. We find that the extinction coefficients of a popular ``gold'' set are well correlated with the deviation of magnitudes from Hubble…