Related papers: A complex speciation-richness relationship in a si…
In this paper, we inspect well-known population genetics and social dynamics models. In these models, interacting individuals, while participating in a self-organizing process, give rise to the emergence of complex behaviors and patterns.…
Ecological networks describe the interactions between different species, informing us of how they rely on one another for food, pollination and survival. If a species in an ecosystem is under threat of extinction, it can affect other…
Diversity is a fundamental feature of ecosystems, even when the concept of ecosystem is extended to sociology or economics. Diversity can be intended as the count of different items, animals, or, more generally, interactions. There are two…
We use a generalised version of the individual-based Tangled Nature model of evolutionary ecology to study the relationship between ecosystem structure and evolutionary history. Our evolved model ecosystems typically exhibit interaction…
Diverse communities of competing species are generally characterized by substantial niche overlap and strongly stochastic dynamics. Abundance fluctuations are proportional to population size, so the dynamics of rare populations is slower.…
We study the effect of speciation, i.e. the introduction of new species through evolution into communities, in the setting of predator-prey systems. Predator-prey dynamics is classically well modeled by Lotka-Volterra equations, also when…
Ecological systems comprise an astonishing diversity of species that cooperate or compete with each other forming complex mutual dependencies. The minimum requirements to maintain a large species diversity on long time scales are in general…
Ecological selection is a major driver of community assembly. Selection is classified as stabilizing when species with intermediate trait values gain the highest reproductive success, whereas selection is considered directional when fitness…
We propose a minimal model of the dynamics of diversity -- replicator equations with extinction, invasion and mutation. We numerically study the behavior of this simple model and show that it displays completely different behavior from the…
Networks play a prominent role in the study of complex systems of interacting entities in biology, sociology, and economics. Despite this diversity, we demonstrate here that a statistical model decomposing networks into matching and…
Ecosystems dynamics is often considered as driven by a coupling of species' resource consumption and its population size dynamics. Such resource-population dynamics is captured by MacArthur-type models. One biologically relevant feature…
The relationships between diversity, productivity and scale determine much of the structure and robustness of complex biological and social systems. While arguments for the link between specialization and productivity are common, diversity…
Speciation is fundamental to the huge diversity of life on Earth. Evidence suggests reproductive isolation arises most commonly in allopatry with a higher speciation rate in small populations. Current theory does not address this dependence…
The observed architecture of ecological and socio-economic networks differs significantly from that of random networks. From a network science standpoint, non-random structural patterns observed in real networks call for an explanation of…
On a global level, ecological communities are being perturbed at an unprecedented rate by human activities and environmental instabilities. Yet, we understand little about what factors facilitate or impede long-term persistence of these…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
Relations among species in ecosystems can be represented by complex networks where both negative (competition) and positive (mutualism) interactions are concurrently present. Recently, it has been shown that many ecosystems can be cast into…
A new model ecosystem consisting of many interacting species is introduced. The species are connected through a random matrix with a given connectivity. It is shown that the system is organized close to a boundary of marginal stability in…
A microscopic model is developed, within the frame of the theory of quantitative traits, to study both numerically and analytically the combined effect of competition and assortativity on the sympatric speciation process, i.e. speciation in…
We used a metacommunity of 49 discrete communities of aquatic invertebrates to analyze the dynamical relationship between community and metacommunity species distributions as a test of the neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography. At…