Related papers: Threshold Extinction in Food Webs
Network structure or connectivity pattern is critical in determining collective dynamics among interacting species in ecosystems. Conventional research on species persistence in spatial populations has focused on static network structure,…
The survival of populations hinges on their ability to offset local extinctions through new colonizations. The dispersal area ($A$) plays a crucial role in this process, as it determines the probability of finding colonizable vacant sites.…
Researchers puzzle over questions as to how rare species survive extinction, and why a significant proportion of microbial taxa are dormant. Computational simulation modeling by a genetic algorithm provides some answers. First, a…
Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…
Terrestrial ecosystems are generally green and only a small part (<10%) of the plant matter is consumed by herbivores annually,but the reason has been unclear due to the lack of food web models for predicting the absolute herbivore biomass…
Body size drives the energetic demands of organisms, constraining trophic interactions between species and playing a significant role in shaping the feasibility of species' populations in a community. On macroevolutionary timescales, these…
The issue of food waste is a major problem contributing to the emission of greenhouse gases into the environment in addition to causing illness in humans. This research aimed to develop a correlation between the amount of time until a food…
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has long been an area of substantial interest to ecologists because most fundamental biological processes, such as protein synthesis and respiration, are inherently energy-consuming. Microbial communities are…
Many systems on our planet are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across a "tipping point," such as mass extinctions in ecological networks, cascading failures in infrastructure systems,…
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 the networks. We derive an analytical expression of the…
Consumers face numerous risks that can be minimized by incorporating different life-history strategies. How much and when a consumer adds to its energetic reserves or invests in reproduction are key behavioral and physiological adaptations…
We present a model for evolution and extinction in large ecosystems. The model incorporates the effects of interactions between species and the influences of abiotic environmental factors. We study the properties of the model by approximate…
Ecology and evolution are inseparable. Motivated by some recent experiments, we have developed models of evolutionary ecology from the perspective of dynamic networks. In these models, in addition to the intra-node dynamics, which…
Economic incentives to harvest a species usually diminish as its abundance declines, because harvest costs increase. This prevents harvesting to extinction. A known exception can occur if consumer demand causes a declining species' harvest…
The complexity of an ecological community can be distilled into a network, where diverse interactions connect species in a web of dependencies. Species interact not only with each other but indirectly through environmental effects, however…
The reproduction number of deterministic models is an essential quantity to predict whether an epidemic will spread or die out. Thresholds for disease extinction contribute crucial knowledge on disease control, elimination, and mitigation…
Food webs -- networks of predators and prey -- have long been known to exhibit "intervality": species can generally be ordered along a single axis in such a way that the prey of any given predator tend to lie on unbroken compact intervals.…
While fields like Artificial Life have made huge strides in quantifying the mechanisms that distinguish living systems from non-living ones, particular mechanisms remain difficult to reproduce in silico. Known as open-endedness, we've been…
We consider a nonlocal bistable reaction-diffusion equation, which serves as a model for a population structured by a phenotypic trait, subject to mutation, trait-dependent fitness, and nonlocal competition. Within this replicator-mutator…
Observations of the evolution of species groups in nature, such as well recognized Galapagos finches, have motivated much theoretical research aimed at understanding the processes associated with such radiations. The Penna model is one such…