Related papers: Modelling ecological communities as if they were D…
Biogeographical regions (geographically distinct assemblages of species and communities) constitute a cornerstone for ecology, biogeography, evolution and conservation biology. Species turnover measures are often used to quantify…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
The potential effects of conservation actions on threatened species can be predicted using ensemble ecosystem models by forecasting populations with and without intervention. These model ensembles commonly assume stable coexistence of…
The emergence of collective cooperation in competitive environments is a well-known phenomenon in biology, economics, and social systems. While most evolutionary game models focus on the evolution of strategies for a fixed game, how…
Feedbacks between strategies and the environment are common in social-ecological, evolutionary-ecological, and even psychological-economic systems. Utilizing common resources is always a dilemma for community members, like tragedy of the…
Species-rich communities, such as the microbiota or microbial ecosystems, provide key functions for human health and climatic resilience. Increasing effort is being dedicated to design experimental protocols for selecting community-level…
Character evolution that affects ecological community interactions often occurs contemporaneously with temporal changes in population size, potentially altering the very nature of those dynamics. Such eco-evolutionary processes may be most…
Detecting the time evolution of the community structure of networks is crucial to identify major changes in the internal organization of many complex systems, which may undergo important endogenous or exogenous events. This analysis can be…
In 1972, Robert May triggered a worldwide research program studying ecological communities using random matrix theory. Yet, it remains unclear if and when we can treat real communities as random ecosystems. Here, we draw on recent progress…
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…
Promoting and increasing energy efficiency is a promising method of reducing CO2 emissions and avoiding the potentially devastating effects of climate change. The question is: How do we induce a cultural or behavioural change whereby people…
Many social and biological networks consist of communities - groups of nodes within which connections are dense, but between which connections are sparser. Recently, there has been considerable interest in designing algorithms for detecting…
Understanding how the structure of community interactions is modified by coevolution is vital for understanding system responses to change at all scales. However, in absence of a group selection process, collective community behaviours…
Dynamic networks, especially those representing social networks, undergo constant evolution of their community structure over time. Nodes can migrate between different communities, communities can split into multiple new communities,…
The environment has a strong influence on a population's evolutionary dynamics. Driven by both intrinsic and external factors, the environment is subject to continual change in nature. To capture an ever-changing environment, we consider a…
The advantages of temporal networks in capturing complex dynamics, such as diffusion and contagion, has led to breakthroughs in real world systems across numerous fields. In the case of human behavior, face-to-face interaction networks…
Spatial ecological networks are widely used to model interactions between georeferenced biological entities (e.g., populations or communities). The analysis of such data often leads to a two-step approach where groups containing similar…
Predicting the future direction of community evolution is a problem with high theoretical and practical significance. It allows to determine which characteristics describing communities have importance from the point of view of their future…
Social relationships can be divided into different classes based on the regularity with which they occur and the similarity among them. Thus, rare and somewhat similar relationships are random and cause noise in a social network, thus…