Related papers: A phase transition between the niche and neutral r…
Structure, composition and stability of ecological populations are shaped by the inter- and intra-species interactions within these communities. It remains to be fully understood how the interplay of these interactions with other factors,…
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.…
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…
The functioning of animal as well as human societies fundamentally relies on cooperation. Yet, defection is often favorable for the selfish individual, and social dilemmas arise. Selection by individuals' fitness, usually the basic driving…
In both natural and artificial studies, evolution is often seen as synonymous to natural selection. Individuals evolve under pressures set by environments that are either reset or do not carry over significant changes from previous…
Ecological communities with many species can be classified into dynamical phases. In systems with all-to-all interactions, a phase where a fixed point is always reached and a dynamically-fluctuating phase have been found. The dynamics when…
A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special conceptual challenges because of the strong mutual influences…
Niche and neutral theory are two prevailing, yet much debated, ideas in ecology proposed to explain the patterns of biodiversity. Whereas niche theory emphasizes selective differences between species and interspecific interactions in…
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…
Ecosystems often undergo abrupt regime shifts in response to gradual external changes. These shifts are theoretically understood as a regime switch between alternative stable states of the ecosystem dynamical response to smooth changes in…
We present a non-neutral stochastic model for the dynamics taking place in a meta-community ecosystems in presence of migration. The model provides a framework for describing the emergence of multiple ecological scenarios and behaves in two…
The evolutionary and ecological processes behind the origin of species are among the most fundamental problems in biology. In fact, many theoretical hypothesis on different type of speciation have been proposed. In particular, models of…
In complex ecosystems such as microbial communities, there is constant ecological and evolutionary feedback between the residing species and the environment occurring on concurrent timescales. Species respond and adapt to their surroundings…
Environmental fluctuations have important consequences in the organization of ecological communities, and understanding how such a variability influences the biodiversity of an ecosystem is a major question in ecology. In this paper, we…
Many-variable differential equations with random coefficients provide powerful models for the dynamics of many interacting species in ecology. These models are known to exhibit a dynamical phase transition from a phase where population…
We investigate the evolutionary dynamics of a finite population of RNA sequences adapting to a neutral fitness landscape. Despite the lack of differential fitness between viable sequences, we observe typical properties of adaptive…
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…
We study a stochastic community model able to interpolate from a neutral regime to a niche partitioned regime upon varying a single parameter tuning the intensity of niche stabilization, namely the difference between intraspecific and…
While Neutral Theory famously describes the number of discrete genetic differences in populations, we consider the number of genetic backgrounds under which such differences are observed - setting limits to the generalizability of their…
Neutral theories have played a crucial and revolutionary role in fields such as population genetics and biogeography. These theories are critical by definition, in the sense that the overall growth rate of each single allele/species/type…