Related papers: An exactly solvable coarse-grained model for speci…
A discrete time branching process where the offspring distribution is generation-dependent, and the number of reproductive individuals is controlled by a random mechanism is considered. This model is a Markov chain but, in general, the…
Hubbell's neutral theory of biodiversity has successfully explained the observed composition of many ecological communities but it relies on strict demographic equivalence among species and provides no room for evolutionary processes like…
Natural ecosystems are characterized by striking diversity of form and functions and yet exhibit deep symmetries emerging across scales of space, time and organizational complexity. Species-area relationships and species-abundance…
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…
Self-organized pattern formation is vital for many biological processes. Reaction-diffusion models have advanced our understanding of how biological systems develop spatial structures, starting from homogeneity. However, biological…
We propose and analyze a nonlinear age-structured multi-species model that serves as a unifying framework for ecological and biotechnological systems in complex environments (microbial communities, bioreactors, and others). The formulation…
Ecological patterns arise from the interplay of many different processes, and yet the emergence of consistent phenomena across a diverse range of ecological systems suggests that many patterns may in part be determined by statistical or…
The dynamics of two competing species in a finite size community is one of the most studied problems in population genetics and community ecology. Stochastic fluctuations lead, inevitably, to the extinction of one of the species, but the…
Individuals within any species exhibit differences in size, developmental state, or spatial location. These differences coupled with environmental fluctuations in demographic rates can have subtle effects on population persistence and…
In a wide variety of natural systems, closely-related microbial strains coexist stably, resulting in high levels of fine-scale biodiversity. However, the mechanisms that stabilize this coexistence are not fully understood. Spatial…
An important challenge in theoretical ecology is to find good, coarse-grained representations of complex food webs. Here we use the approach of generalized modeling to show that it may be possible to formulate a coarse-graining algorithm…
The dynamics of many microbial ecosystems are driven by cross-feeding interactions, in which metabolites excreted by some species are metabolised further by others. The population dynamics of such ecosystems are governed by…
We present an explicit unified stochastic model of fluctuations in population size due to random birth, death, density-dependent competition and environmental fluctuations. Stochastic dynamics provide insight into small populations,…
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…
Logarithmic growth-rates are fundamental observables for describing ecological systems and the characterization of their distributions with analytical techniques can greatly improve their comprehension. Here a neutral model based on a…
An analytical approximation is derived for the Zero Sum Multinomial distribution which gives the Species Abundance Distribution in Neutral Community Models. The obtained distribution function describes well computer simulation results on…
Source-sink systems are metapopulations of habitat patches with different, and possibly temporally varying, habitat qualities, which are commonly used in ecology to study the fate of spatially extended natural populations. We propose new…
Most population models assume that individuals within a given population are identical, that is, the fundamental role of variation is ignored. Here we develop a general approach to modeling heterogeneous populations with discrete…
We study species abundance in the empirical plant-pollinator mutualistic networks exhibiting broad degree distributions, with uniform intra-group competition assumed, by the Lotka-Volterra equation. The stability of a fixed point is found…
Ecological communities are composed of species interactions that respond to environmental fluctuations. Despite increasing evidence of temporal variation in these interactions, most theoretical frameworks remain rooted in static…