Related papers: A framework for analyzing ecological trait-based m…
Ecosystems display a complex spatial organization. Ecologists have long tried to characterize them by looking at how different measures of biodiversity change across spatial scales. Ecological neutral theory has provided simple predictions…
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…
Niche and neutral theory are two prevailing, yet much debated, ideas in ecology proposed to explain the patterns of biodiversity. Whereas niche theory emphasizes selective differences between species and interspecific interactions in…
Understanding the forces shaping ecological communities is crucially important to basic science and conservation. In recent years, considerable progress was made in explaining communities using simple and general models, with neutral theory…
Several theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explain observed biodiversity patterns, ranging from the classical niche-based theories, mainly employing a continuous formalism, to neutral theories, based on statistical mechanics of…
We demonstrate how niche theory and Hubbell's original formulation of neutral theory can be blended together into a general framework modeling the combined effects of selection, drift, speciation, and dispersal on community dynamics. This…
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…
There have been many studies to examine whether one trait is correlated with another trait across a group of present-day species (for example, do species with larger brains tend to have longer gestation times. Since the introduction of the…
Intraspecific trait variation has been increasingly recognized as an important factor in determining species interaction and diversity. Eco-evolutionary models have studied the distribution of trait values within a population that changes…
Predicting species persistence within ecological communities is a fundamental challenge for both empirical and theoretical ecology. Existing methods span from mechanistic models, whose parameters are difficult to estimate from data, to…
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…
Ecological selection is a major driver of community assembly. Selection is classified as stabilizing when species with intermediate trait values gain the highest reproductive success, whereas selection is considered directional when fitness…
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…
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…
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…
A biologically motivated individual-based framework for evolution in network-structured populations is developed that can accommodate eco-evolutionary dynamics. This framework is used to construct a network birth and death model. The…
The basic mechanics of evolution have been understood since Darwin. But debate continues over whether macroevolutionary phenomena are driven primary by the fitness structure of genotype space or by ecological interaction. In this paper we…
Infinitely many distinct trait values may arise in populations bearing quantitative traits, and modeling their population dynamics is thus a formidable task. While classical models assume fixed or infinite population size, models in which…
Random walks on multidimensional nonlinear landscapes are of interest in many areas of science and engineering. In particular, properties of adaptive trajectories on fitness landscapes determine population fates and thus play a central role…
In ecological studies niche overlap is often used to quantify species interaction and dynamics. This paper develops a robust, nonparametric statistical framework for quantifying and analyzing multivariate niche overlap. Parametric methods…