Related papers: General relationships between consumer dispersal, …
Many biological populations exhibit diversity in their strategy for survival and reproduction in a given environment, and microbes are an example. We explore the fate of different strategies under sustained environmental change by…
Standard game theory cannot describe microbial interactions mediated by diffusible molecules. Nevertheless, we show that one can still model microbial dynamics using game theory with parameters renormalized by diffusion. Contrary to…
Despite the common misconception of nearly static organisms, plants do interact continuously with the environment and with each other. It is fair to assume that during their evolution they developed particular features to overcome problems…
Understanding the main determinants of species coexistence across space and time is a central question in ecology. However, ecologists still know little about the scales and conditions at which biotic interactions matter and how these…
Two species with similar resource requirements respond in a characteristic way to variations in their habitat -- their abundances rise and fall in concert. We use this idea to learn how bacterial populations in the microbiota respond to…
On a global level, ecological communities are being perturbed at an unprecedented rate by human activities and environmental instabilities. Yet, we understand little about what factors facilitate or impede long-term persistence of these…
Entropy measures of probability distributions are widely used measures in ecology, biology, genetics, and in other fields, to quantify species diversity of a community. Unfortunately, entropy-based diversity indices, or diversity indices…
The margins within the geographic range of species are often specific in terms of ecological and evolutionary processes, and can strongly influence the species' reaction to climate change. One of the frequently observed features at range…
Many complex adaptive systems contain a large diversity of specialized components. The specialization at the level of the microscopic degrees of freedom, and diversity at the level of the system as a whole are phenomena that appear during…
Geographic ranges of communities of species evolve in response to environmental, ecological, and evolutionary forces. Understanding the effects of these forces on species' range dynamics is a major goal of spatial ecology. Previous…
Genetic drift at the frontiers of two-dimensional range expansions of microorganisms can frustrate local cooperation between different genetic variants, demixing the population into distinct sectors. In a biological context, mutualistic or…
Rapidly mutating pathogens may be able to persist in the population and reach an endemic equilibrium by escaping hosts' acquired immunity. For such diseases, multiple biological, environmental and population-level mechanisms determine the…
We investigate the long-time behavior of phenotype-structured models describing evolutionary dynamics of asexual populations, and analyze the joint effects of nonlocal interactions and spatial resource distributions on the global dynamics…
The origin of altruistic behavior, i.e. the behavior that is useful for a population or a species but goes at the expense of an altruistic individual, has long been a challenge for students of evolutionary biology. The populations with…
The paper is concerned with different types of dispersal chosen by competing species. We introduce a model with the diffusion-type term $\nabla \cdot \left[ a \nabla \left( u/P \right) \right]$ which includes some previously studied systems…
Research over the past few decades has assumed the richness (number of species) to be the primary driver of the biodiversity and ecosystem function (BEF) relationship. However, biodiversity is multi-dimensional, and richness alone does not…
We use ideas from distributed computing and game theory to study dynamic and decentralized environments in which computational nodes, or decision makers, interact strategically and with limited information. In such environments, which arise…
Using a sample from a population to estimate the proportion of the population with a certain category label is a broadly important problem. In the context of microbiome studies, this problem arises when researchers wish to use a sample from…
Socio-diversity, the variety of human opinions, ideas, behaviors and styles, has profound implications for social systems. While it fuels innovation, productivity, and collective intelligence, it can also complicate communication and erode…
The species-area relationship is one of the central generalizations in ecology however its origin has remained a puzzle. Since ecosystems are understood as energy transduction systems, the regularities in species richness are considered to…