Related papers: Threshold Extinction in Food Webs
Microorganisms live in environments that inevitably fluctuate between mild and harsh conditions. As harsh conditions may cause extinctions, the rate at which fluctuations occur can shape microbial communities and their diversity, but we…
Notable recent works have focused on the multi-layer properties of coevolving diseases. We point out that very similar systems play an important role in population ecology. Specifically we study a meta food-web model that was recently…
Population extinction is a rare event which requires overcoming an effective barrier. We show that the extinction rate can be fragile: a small change in the system parameters leads to an exponentially strong change of the rate, with the…
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…
We study the phase transition from the persistence phase to the extinction phase for the SIRS (susceptible/ infected/ refractory/ susceptible) model of diseases spreading on small world network. We show the effects of all the parameters…
We introduce a new model for plant metapopulations with a seed bank component, living in a fragmented environment in which local extinction events are frequent. This model is an intermediate between population dynamics models with a seed…
Specialization is a hallmark of humans. Specialization in the real world (with imperfectly sorted partners, imperfectly calibrated supply and demand, and high failure risk) requires redundancy in relationships, which prevents specialists…
A model for large-scale evolution recently introduced by Amaral and Meyer is studied analytically and numerically. Species are located at different trophic levels and become extinct if their prey becomes extinct. It is proved that this…
Many types of bacteria can survive under stress by switching stochastically between two different phenotypes: the "normals" who multiply fast, but are vulnerable to stress, and the "persisters" who hardly multiply, but are resilient to…
Understanding the mechanisms governing population extinctions is of key importance to many problems in ecology and evolution. Stochastic factors are known to play a central role in extinction, but the interactions between a population's…
Humankind has spread worldwide supported by cultural and technological knowledge, but the environmental sustainability on the human niche evolution depends on a new human beings relationship with the biosphere. Human lifestyles nowadays are…
Components in many real-world complex systems depend on each other for the resources required for survival, and may die of a shortage. These patterns of dependencies often take the form of a complex network whose structure potentially…
Human activity is leading to changes in the mean and variability of climatic parameters in most locations around the world. The changing mean has received considerable attention from scientists and climate policy makers. However, recent…
In the study of infectious diseases on networks, researchers calculate epidemic thresholds to help forecast whether a disease will eventually infect a large fraction of a population. Because network structure typically changes in time,…
One of the central themes in modern ecology is the enduring debate on whether there is a relationship between the complexity of a biological community and its stability. In this paper, we focus on the role of detritus and spatial dispersion…
We consider epidemic extinction in finite networks with broad variation in local connectivity. Generalizing the theory of large fluctuations to random networks with a given degree distribution, we are able to predict the most probable, or…
Anaerobic digestion enables the water industry to treat wastewater as a resource for generating energy and recovering valuable by-products. The complexity of the anaerobic digestion process has motivated the development of complex models.…
Planning for the protection of species often involves difficult choices about which species to prioritize, given constrained resources. One way of prioritizing species is to consider their "evolutionary distinctiveness", i.e. their relative…
In the Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) model of disease spreading, the time to extinction of the epidemics happens at an intermediate value of the per-contact transmission probability. Too contagious infections burn out fast in the…
It is well known that excessive harvesting or hunting has driven species to extinction both on local and global scales. This leads to one of the fundamental problems of conservation ecology: how should we harvest a population so that…