Related papers: No complexity-stability relationship in natural co…
Effects of changes in functional composition of soil communities on nutrient cycling are still not well understood. Models simulating community dynamics overcome the technical challenges of conducting species removal experiments in the…
Robert May famously used random matrix theory to predict that large, complex systems cannot admit stable fixed points. However, this general conclusion is not always supported by empirical observation: from cells to biomes, biological…
Complex networks describe a wide range of systems in nature and society, much quoted examples including the cell, a network of chemicals linked by chemical reactions, or the Internet, a network of routers and computers connected by physical…
Complex ecological networks are often characterized by intricate interactions that extend beyond pairwise relationships. Understanding the stability of higher-order ecological networks is salient for species coexistence, biodiversity, and…
Both human-made and natural supply systems, such as power grids and leaf venation networks, are built to operate reliably under changing external conditions. Many of these spatial networks exhibit community structures. Here, we show that a…
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…
We study an individual-based predator-prey model of biological coevolution, using linear stability analysis and large-scale kinetic Monte Carlo simulations. The model exhibits approximate 1/f noise in diversity and population-size…
In natural ecosystems, species can be characterized by the nonlinear density-dependent self-regulation of their growth profile. Species of many taxa show a substantial density-dependent reduction for low population size. Nevertheless, many…
Following the financial crisis of 2007-2008, a deep analogy between the origins of instability in financial systems and complex ecosystems has been pointed out: in both cases, topological features of network structures influence how easily…
Mutualistic interactions, which are beneficial for both interacting species, are recurrently present in ecosystems. Observations of natural systems showed that, if we draw mutualistic relationships as binary links between species, the…
Microbiome-based stratification of healthy individuals into compositional categories, referred to as "community types", holds promise for drastically improving personalized medicine. Despite this potential, the existence of community types…
The question What is Complexity? has occupied a great deal of time and paper over the last 20 or so years. There are a myriad different perspectives and definitions but still no consensus. In this paper I take a phenomenological approach,…
Many complex systems in nature and society can be described in terms of networks capturing the intricate web of connections among the units they are made of. A key question is how to interpret the global organization of such networks as the…
We use food webs generated by a model to investigate the effects of deleting species on other species in the web and on the web as a whole. The model incorporates a realistic population dynamics, adaptive foragers and other features which…
Shortest paths are not always simple. In planar networks, they can be very different from those with the smallest number of turns - the simplest paths. The statistical comparison of the lengths of the shortest and simplest paths provides a…
The relationship between network topology and system dynamics has significant implications for unifying our understanding of the interplay among metabolic, gene-regulatory, and ecosystem network architecures. Here we analyze the stability…
Networks in nature do not act in isolation but instead exchange information, and depend on each other to function properly. An incipient theory of Networks of Networks have shown that connected random networks may very easily result in…
The importance of structured, complex connectivity patterns found in several real-world systems is to a great extent related to their respective effects in constraining and even defining the respective dynamics. Yet, while complex networks…
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…
Quantitative population modelling is an invaluable tool for identifying the cascading effects of ecosystem management and interventions. Ecosystem models are often constructed by assuming stability and coexistence in ecological communities…