Related papers: Effects of Mixing Interaction Types on Ecological …
We introduce a mathematical model of symbiosis between different species by taking into account the influence of each species on the carrying capacities of the others. The modeled entities can pertain to biological and ecological societies…
Individual species may experience diverse outcomes, from prosperity to extinction, in an ecological community subject to external and internal variations. Despite the wealth of theoretical results derived from random matrix ensembles, a…
In complex ecological communities, species may self-organize into clusters or clumps where highly similar species can coexist. The emergence of such species clusters can be captured by the interplay between neutral and niche theories. Based…
Random matrix theory successfully connects the structure of interactions of large ecological communities to their ability to respond to perturbations. One of the most debated aspects of this approach is the missing role of population…
We investigate the outcome of generalised Lotka-Volterra dynamics of ecological communities with random interaction coefficients and non-linear feedback. We show in simulations that the saturation of non-linear feedback stabilises the…
Synergistic and antagonistic interactions in multi-species populations - such as resource sharing and competition - result in remarkably diverse behaviors in populations of interacting cells, such as in soil or human microbiomes, or clonal…
Stability is a desirable property of complex ecosystems. If a community of interacting species is at a stable equilibrium point then it is able to withstand small perturbations to component species' abundances without suffering adverse…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…
Microbial communities routinely have several possible species compositions or community states observed for the same environmental parameters. Changes in these parameters can trigger abrupt and persistent transitions (regime shifts) between…
We investigate the relationship between the nested organization of mutualistic systems and their robustness against the extinction of species. We establish that a nested pattern of contacts is the best possible one as far as robustness is…
We consider the concept of mutual information in ecological networks, and use this idea to analyse the Tangled Nature model of co-evolution. We show that this measure of correlation has two distinct behaviours depending on how we define the…
Complex systems with global interactions tend to be stable if interactions between components are sufficiently homogeneous. In biological systems, which often have small copy numbers and interactions mediated by diffusing agents, noise and…
Although networks provide a powerful approach to study a large variety of ecological systems, their formulation does not typically account for multiple interaction types, interactions that vary in space and time, and interconnected systems…
In this report, I will review some of the most used models in theoretical ecology along with appealing reformulations and recent results in terms of diversity, stability, and functioning of large well-mixed ecological communities.
Randomly-assembled dynamical systems are theoretically predicted to be unstable upon crossing a critical threshold of complexity, as first shown by May. Yet, empirical complex systems exhibit remarkable stability, indicating the presence of…
Interactions among living organisms, from bacteria colonies to human societies, are inherently more complex than interactions among particles and nonliving matter. Group interactions are a particularly important and widespread class,…
The assembly and persistence of ecological communities can be understood as the result of the interaction and migration of species. Here we study a single community subject to migration from a species pool in which inter-specific…
Clonal microbes can switch between different phenotypes and recent theoretical work has shown that stochastic switching between these subpopulations can stabilize microbial communities. This phenotypic switching need not be stochastic,…
Many animals live in societies where individuals frequently interact socially with each other. The social structures of these systems can be studied in depth by means of network analysis. A large number of studies on animal social networks…
We investigate global stability and dynamics of large ecological networks by classical methods of the dynamical system theory, including Hamiltonian methods, and averaging. Our analysis exploits the network topological structure, namely,…