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Predicting the fate of ecologies is a daunting, albeit extremely important, task. As part of this task one needs to develop an understanding of the organization, hierarchies, and correlations among the species forming the ecology. Focusing…
The question what determines the structure of natural food webs has been listed among the nine most important unanswered questions in ecology. It arises naturally from many problems related to ecosystem stability and resilience. The…
The response of complex networks to perturbations is of utmost importance in areas as diverse as ecosystem management, emergency response, and cell reprogramming. A fundamental property of networks is that the perturbation of one node can…
We consider the goal of predicting how complex networks respond to chronic (press) perturbations when characterizations of their network topology and interaction strengths are associated with uncertainty. Our primary result is the…
Unravelling current complex food systems is relevant for their adjustment and redesign under the current changing climate conditions. Redesign may be necessitated by migration of people and changes of locations of major agri-food…
Why are large, complex ecosystems stable? Both theory and simulations of current models predict the onset of instability with growing size and complexity, so for decades it has been conjectured that ecosystems must have some unidentified…
Metacommunity theory is considered a promising approach for explaining species diversity and food web complexity. Recently Pillai et al. proposed a simple modeling framework for the dynamics of food webs at the metacommunity level. Here, we…
Identifying and understanding modular organizations is centrally important in the study of complex systems. Several approaches to this problem have been advanced, many framed in information-theoretic terms. Our treatment starts from the…
What do societies, the Internet, and the human brain have in common? They are all examples of complex relational systems, whose emerging behaviours are largely determined by the non-trivial networks of interactions among their constituents,…
The study of complex systems has attracted widespread attention from researchers in the fields of natural sciences, social sciences, and engineering. Prediction is one of the central issues in this field. Although most related studies have…
The non-trivial structure of such complex systems makes the analysis of their collective behavior a challenge. The problem is even more difficult when the information is distributed across networks (e.g., communication networks in different…
We report the results of carrying out a large number of simulations on a coevolutionary model of multispecies communities. A wide range of parameter values were investigated which allowed a rather complete picture of the change in behaviour…
The networks of predator-prey interactions in ecological systems are remarkably complex, but nevertheless surprisingly stable in terms of long term persistence of the system as a whole. In order to understand the mechanism driving the…
We adapt existing statistical modeling techniques for social networks to study consumption data observed in trophic food webs. These data describe the feeding volume (non-negative) among organisms grouped into nodes, called trophic species,…
Networks effectively capture interactions among components of complex systems, and have thus become a mainstay in many scientific disciplines. Growing evidence, especially from biology, suggest that networks undergo changes over time, and…
World food supply is crucial to the well-being of every human on the planet in the basic sense that we need food to live. It also has a profound impact on the world economy, international trade and global political stability. Furthermore,…
Each complex network (or class of networks) presents specific topological features which characterize its connectivity and highly influence the dynamics of processes executed on the network. The analysis, discrimination, and synthesis of…
Real-world complex systems such as ecological communities and neuron networks are essential parts of our everyday lives. These systems are composed of units which interact through intricate networks. The ability to predict sudden changes in…
In the world, in which acceptance and the identification with social communities are highly desired, the ability to predict evolution of groups over time appears to be a vital but very complex research problem. Therefore, we propose a new,…
Networks are widely used in the biological, physical, and social sciences as a concise mathematical representation of the topology of systems of interacting components. Understanding the structure of these networks is one of the outstanding…