Related papers: A road map for synthesizing the scaling patterns i…

One of the first successes of neutral ecology was to predict realistically-broad distributions of rare and abundant species. However, it has remained an outstanding theoretical challenge to describe how this distribution of abundances…

Preserving biodiversity and ecosystem stability is a challenge that can be pursued through modern statistical mechanics modeling. Here we introduce a variational maximum entropy-based algorithm to evaluate the entropy in a minimal ecosystem…

Ecological communities exhibit pervasive patterns and inter-relationships between size, abundance, and the availability of resources. We use scaling ideas to develop a unified, model-independent framework for understanding the distribution…

Modeling environmental ecosystems is essential for effective resource management, sustainable development, and understanding complex ecological processes. However, traditional data-driven methods face challenges in capturing inherently…

We study the statistics of ecosystems with a variable number of co-evolving species. The species interact in two ways: by prey-predator relationships and by direct competition with similar kinds. The interaction coefficients change slowly…

The climate system is a forced, dissipative, nonlinear, complex and heterogeneous system that is out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The system exhibits natural variability on many scales of motion, in time as well as space, and it is subject…

[Context & Motivation] Adaptive systems are an important research area. The dominant reason for adaptivity in systems are changes in the environment. Thus, it is an important question how to model the environment and how to determine the…

Scale invariance is a central organizing principle in physics, underlying phenomena that range from critical behaviour in statistical mechanics to transport and chaos in nonlinear dynamical systems. Here we present a unified and physically…

In a complex system, the individual components are neither so tightly coupled or correlated that they can all be treated as a single unit, nor so uncorrelated that they can be approximated as independent entities. Instead, patterns of…

Scaling laws illuminate Nature's fundamental biological principles and guide bioinspired materials and structural designs. In simple cases they are based on the fundamental principle that all laws of nature remain unchanged (i.e.,…

Interacting proteins coevolve at multiple but interconnected scales, from the residue-residue over the protein-protein up to the family-family level. The recent accumulation of enormous amounts of sequence data allows for the development of…

Main aim of this topical issue is to report recent advances in noisy nonequilibrium processes useful to describe the dynamics of ecological systems and to address the mechanisms of spatio-temporal pattern formation in ecology both from the…

Growing anthropogenic pressures have increased the need for robust predictive models. Meeting this demand requires approaches that can handle bigger data to yield forecasts that capture the variability and underlying uncertainty of…

A class of models for large-scale evolution and mass extinctions is presented. These models incorporate environmental changes on all scales, from influences on a single species to global effects. This is a step towards a unified picture of…

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…

Ecology studies the interactions between individuals, species and the environment. The ability to predict the dynamics of ecological systems would support the design and monitoring of control strategies and would help to address pressing…

We present new theoretical and empirical results on the probability distributions of species persistence times in natural ecosystems. Persistence times, defined as the timespans occurring between species' colonization and local extinction…

Change is a fundamental ingredient of interaction patterns in biology, technology, the economy, and science itself: Interactions within and between organisms change; transportation patterns by air, land, and sea all change; the global…

How ecosystems respond to environmental perturbations is a fundamental question in ecology, made especially challenging due to the strong coupling between species and their environment. Here, we introduce a theoretical framework for…

Patterns in a semiarid ecosystem are important because they directly and indirectly affect ecological processes, biodiversity, and ecosystem resilience. Understanding the causes and effects of these patterns is critical for long-term land…