Related papers: Large ecosystems in transition: bifurcations and m…

Ecosystems are complex systems, currently experiencing several threats associated with global warming, intensive exploitation, and human-driven habitat degradation. Such threats are pushing ecosystems to the brink of collapse. Because of a…

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?…

Recent methodological advances are enabling better examination of speciation and extinction processes and patterns. A major open question is the origin of large discrepancies in species number between groups of the same age. Existing…

Motivated by the climate crisis that is currently ravaging the planet, we propose and analyze a novel framework for the evolution of anthropogenic climate impact in which the evolution of human environmental behavior and environmental…

The growth of complex populations, such as microbial communities, forests, and cities, occurs over vastly different spatial and temporal scales. Although research in different fields has developed detailed, system-specific models to…

Organisms shape their own environment, which in turn affects their survival. This feedback becomes especially important for communities containing a large number of species; however, few existing approaches allow studying this regime,…

As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…

Ecological networks describe the interactions between different species, informing us of how they rely on one another for food, pollination and survival. If a species in an ecosystem is under threat of extinction, it can affect other…

Modelling how populations respond to habitat loss is crucial for understanding ecosystem stability, especially when positive interactions among resource species, such as plant-plant facilitation, play a key role. Habitat loss not only…

We explore the connection between migration patterns and emergent behaviors of evolving populations in spatially heterogeneous environments. Despite extensive studies in ecologically and medically important systems, a unifying framework…

Ecosystems can undergo sudden shifts to undesirable states, but recent studies with simple single species ecosystems have demonstrated that advance warning can be provided by the slowing down of population dynamics near a tipping point.…

Cyclic dominant systems, like rock-paper-scissors game, are frequently used to explain biodiversity in nature, where mobility, reproduction and intransitive competition are on stage to provide the coexistence of competitors. A significantly…

Dispersal is a well recognized driver of ecological and evolutionary dynamics, and simultaneously an evolving trait. Dispersal evolution has traditionally been studied in single-species metapopulations so that it remains unclear how…

We compare and contrast the long-time dynamical properties of two individual-based models of biological coevolution. Selection occurs via multispecies, stochastic population dynamics with reproduction probabilities that depend nonlinearly…

Population genetics struggles to model extinction; standard models track the relative rather than absolute fitness of genotypes, while the exceptions describe only the short-term transition from imminent doom to evolutionary rescue. But…

Macroevolution is considered as a problem of stochastic dynamics in a system with many competing agents. Evolutionary events (speciations and extinctions) are triggered by fitness records found by random exploration of the agents' fitness…

Ecosystems often undergo abrupt regime shifts in response to gradual external changes. These shifts are theoretically understood as a regime switch between alternative stable states of the ecosystem dynamical response to smooth changes in…

Population dynamics is constrained by the environment, which needs to obey certain conditions to support population growth. We consider a standard model for the evolution of a single species population density, that includes reproduction,…

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…

Non-reciprocal interactions between microscopic constituents can profoundly shape the large-scale properties of complex systems. Here, we investigate the effects of non-reciprocity in the context of theoretical ecology by analyzing a…