Related papers: On the statistical machinery of alien species
Theoretically, communities at or near their equilibrium species number resist entry of new species. Such 'biotic resistance' recently has been questioned because of successful entry of alien species into diverse natural communities. Data on…
The statistical properties of an ecosystem composed of species interacting via pairwise, random interactions and deterministic, concentration limiting self-interaction are studied analytically with tools of equilibrium statistical mechanics…
Ecosystems dynamics is often considered as driven by a coupling of species' resource consumption and its population size dynamics. Such resource-population dynamics is captured by MacArthur-type models. One biologically relevant feature…
Natural ecosystems are characterized by striking diversity of form and functions and yet exhibit deep symmetries emerging across scales of space, time and organizational complexity. Species-area relationships and species-abundance…
The maintenance of diversity, the `commonness of rarity', and compositional turnover are ubiquitous features of species-rich communities. Through a minimal model, we consider how these features reflect the interplay between environmental…
Comparative and evolutive ecologists are interested in the distribution of quantitative traits among related species. The classical framework for these distributions consists of a random process running along the branches of a phylogenetic…
Our object of study is the general class of stick-breaking processes with exchangeable length variables. These generalize well-known Bayesian non-parametric priors in an unexplored direction. We give conditions to assure the respective…
Highly-diverse ecosystems exhibit a broad distribution of population sizes and species turnover, where species at high and low abundances are exchanged over time. We show that these two features generically emerge in the fluctuating phase…
Stochastic reaction networks are mathematical models with a wide range of applications in biochemistry, ecology, and epidemiology, and are often complex to analyze. Except for some special cases, it is generally difficult to predict how the…
Joint species distribution models are popular in ecology for modeling covariate effects on species occurrence, while characterizing cross-species dependence. Data consist of multivariate binary indicators of the occurrences of different…
For taxonomic levels higher than species, the abundance distributions of number of subtaxa per taxon tend to approximate power laws, but often show strong deviationns from such a law. Previously, these deviations were attributed to…
In order for clinicians to manage disease progression and make effective decisions about drug dosage, treatment regimens or scheduling follow up appointments, it is necessary to be able to identify both short and long-term trends in…
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…
Disordered systems theory provides powerful tools to analyze the generic behaviors of highdimensional systems, such as species-rich ecological communities or neural networks. By assuming randomness in their interactions, universality…
I give a highly selective overview of the way statistical mechanics explains the microscopic origins of the time asymmetric evolution of macroscopic systems towards equilibrium and of first order phase transitions in equilibrium. These…
Multitype branching processes with immigration in one type are used to model the dynamics of stage-structured plant populations. Parametric inference is first carried out when count data of all types are observed. Statistical…
Let a stick be broken at random at n-1 points to form n pieces. We consider three problems on forming k-gons with k out of these n pieces, and show how a statistical approach, through a linear transformation of variables, yields simple…
The abundance of a species' population in an ecosystem is rarely stationary, often exhibiting large fluctuations over time. Using historical data on marine species, we show that the year-to-year fluctuations of population growth rate obey a…
We analyze several florae (collections of plant species populating specific areas) in different geographic and climatic regions. For every list of species we produce a taxonomic classification tree and we consider its statistical…
Statistical systems are conceived from the standpoint of statistical mechanics, as made of a (generally large) number of identical units and exhibiting a (generally large) number of different configurations (microstates), among which only…