Related papers: Possible Origin of Stagnation and Variability of E…
We investigate the formation of stable ecological networks where many species share the same resource. We show that such stable ecosystem naturally occurs as a result of extinctions. We obtain an analytical relation for the number of…
When can complex ecological interactions drive an entire ecosystem into a persistent non-equilibrium state, where species abundances keep fluctuating without going to extinction? We show that high-diversity spatially-extended systems, in…
Whether or not biodiversity dynamics tend toward stable equilibria remains an unsolved question in ecology and evolution with important implications for our understanding of diversity and its conservation. Phylo/population genetic models…
Despite tremendous interest in the topic and decades of research, the origins of the major losses of biodiversity in the history of life on Earth remain elusive. A variety of possible causes for these mass-extinction events have been…
The terrestrial fossil record shows a significant variation in the extinction and origination rates of species during the past half billion years. Numerous studies have claimed an association between this variation and the motion of the Sun…
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…
Complex evolving systems such as the biosphere, ecosystems and societies exhibit sudden collapses, for reasons that are only partially understood. Here we study this phenomenon using a mathematical model of a system that evolves under…
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…
Mathematical modelling of the evolution of the size-spectrum dynamics in aquatic ecosystems was discovered to be a powerful tool to have a deeper insight into impacts of human- and environmental driven changes on the marine ecosystem. In…
Understanding the relationship between complexity and stability in large dynamical systems -- such as ecosystems -- remains a key open question in complexity theory which has inspired a rich body of work developed over more than fifty…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
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…
Biodiversity widely observed in ecological systems is attributed to the dynamical balance among the competing species. The time-varying populations of the interacting species are often captured rather well by a set of deterministic…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…
We study a dynamic model of ecosystems where immigration plays an essential role both in assembling the species community and in mantaining its biodiversity. This framework is particularly relevant for insular ecosystems. Population…
We study the biodiversity problem for resource competition systems with extinctions and self-limitation effects. Our main result establishes estimates of biodiversity in terms of the fundamental parameters of the model. We also prove the…
Global, population-wide oscillations in models of cyclic dominance may result in the collapse of biodiversity due to the accidental extinction of one species in the loop. Previous research has shown that such oscillations can emerge if the…
The origin of diversification and coexistence of genes and species have been traditionally studied in isolated biological levels. Ecological and evolutionary views have focused on the mechanisms that enable or constrain species coexistence,…
We show how highly-diverse ecological communities may display persistent abundance fluctuations, when interacting through resource competition and subjected to migration from a species pool. This turns out to be closely related to the ratio…
Plankton is the productive base of aquatic ecosystems and plays a major role in the global control of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Nevertheless, after intensive study, the factors that drive its spatial distribution are still far from being…