Related papers: Threshold Extinction in Food Webs
The eco-evolutionary dynamics of species are fundamentally linked to the energetic constraints of its constituent individuals. Of particular importance is the interplay between reproduction and the dynamics of starvation and recovery. To…
We introduce a model of biological evolution where species evolve in response to biotic interactions and a fluctuating environmental stress. The species may either become extinct or mutate to acquire a new fitness value when the effective…
Ecosystems often undergo abrupt regime shifts in response to gradual external changes. These shifts are theoretically understood as a regime switch between alternative stable states of the ecosystem dynamical response to smooth changes in…
Degree distributions have been widely used to characterize biological networks including food webs, and play a vital role in recent models of food web structure. While food webs degree distributions have been suggested to follow various…
During an epidemic, individual nodes in a network may adapt their connections to reduce the chance of infection. A common form of adaption is avoidance rewiring, where a noninfected node breaks a connection to an infected neighbor and forms…
According to the competitive exclusion principle, in a finite ecosystem, extinction occurs naturally when two or more species compete for the same resources. An important question that arises is: when coexistence is not possible, which…
Species populations often modify their environment as they grow. When environmental feedback operates more slowly than population growth, the system can undergo boom-bust dynamics, where the population overshoots its carrying capacity and…
Epidemics have shaped human history, often with devastating consequences, motivating the development of mathematical models to understand and control their dynamics. Among the many aspects of epidemic behavior, the conditions that lead to…
We develop a novel approach to study the global behaviour of large foodwebs for ecosystems where several species share multiple resources. The model extends and generalize some previous works and takes into account self-limitation. Under…
There is empirical evidence from a range of disciplines that as the connectivity of a network increases, we observe an increase in the average fitness of the system. But at the same time, there is an increase in the proportion of…
We review theoretical approaches to the understanding of food webs. After an overview of the available food web data, we discuss three different classes of models. The first class comprise static models, which assign links between species…
Two density-dependent branching processes are considered to model predator-prey populations. For both models, preys are considered to be the main food supply of predators. Moreover, in each generation the number of individuals of each…
Food webs have been found to exhibit remarkable motif profiles, patterns in the relative prevalences of all possible three-species sub-graphs, and this has been related to ecosystem properties such as stability and robustness. Analysing 46…
Macroevolution is considered as a problem of stochastic dynamics in a system with many competing agents. Evolutionary events (speciations and extinctions) are triggered by fitness records found by random exploration of the agents' fitness…
Species extinction occurs regularly and unavoidably in ecological systems. The time scales for extinction can broadly vary and inform on the ecosystem's stability. We study the spatio-temporal extinction dynamics of a paradigmatic…
The concentration of the population in coastal regions, in addition to the direct human use, is leading to an accelerated process of change and deterioration of the marine ecosystems. Human activities such as fishing together with…
The spatial scale of population synchrony gives the characteristic distance at which the population fluctuations are correlated. Therefore, it gives also the characteristic size of the regions of simultaneous population depletion, or even…
Explaining biodiversity in nature is a fundamental problem in ecology. An outstanding challenge is embodied in the so-called Competitive Exclusion Principle: two species competing for one limiting resource cannot coexist at constant…
We study the persistence and extinction of species in a simple food chain that is modelled by a Lotka-Volterra system with environmental stochasticity. There exist sharp results for deterministic Lotka-Volterra systems in the literature but…
Biodiversity widely observed in ecological systems is attributed to the dynamical balance among the competing species. The time-varying populations of the interacting species are often captured rather well by a set of deterministic…