Related papers: Food web assembly rules
Forty years ago, Robert May questioned a central belief in ecology by proving that sufficiently large or complex ecological networks have probability of persisting close to zero. To prove this point, he analyzed large networks in which…
Explaining biodiversity in nature is a fundamental problem in ecology. An outstanding challenge is embodied in the so-called Competitive Exclusion Principle: two species competing for one limiting resource cannot coexist at constant…
We performed a stability analysis of 119 quantitative food webs which were compiled using a standard methodology to build Ecopath mass-balance models. Our analysis reveals that classic descriptors of complexity do not affect stability in…
A fundamental problem in evolutionary ecology research is to explain how different species coexist in natural ecosystems. This question is directly related with species trophic competition. However, competition theory, based on the…
Knowing which parts of a complex system have identical roles simplifies computations and reveals patterns in its network structure. Group theory has been applied to study symmetries in unweighted networks. However, in real-world weighted…
Few of food web theory hypotheses/predictions can be readily tested using empirical data. An exception is represented by simple probabilistic models for food web structure, for which the likelihood has been derived. Here I test the…
When three species compete cyclically in a well-mixed, stochastic system of $N$ individuals, extinction is known to typically occur at times scaling as the system size $N$. This happens, for example, in rock-paper-scissors games or…
The random Lotka-Volterra model is widely used to describe the dynamical and thermodynamic features of ecological communities. In this work, we consider random symmetric interactions between species and analyze the strongly competitive…
Coherence evolution of two food web models can be obtained under the stirring effect of chaotic advection. Each food web model sustains a three--level trophic system composed of interacting predators, consumers and vegetation. These…
Mutualistic networks have attracted increasing attention in the ecological literature in the last decades as they play a key role in the maintenance of biodiversity. Here, we develop an analytical framework to study the structural stability…
Understanding under what conditions interacting populations, whether they be plants, animals, or viral particles, coexist is a question of theoretical and practical importance in population biology. Both biotic interactions and…
Notable recent works have focused on the multi-layer properties of coevolving diseases. We point out that very similar systems play an important role in population ecology. Specifically we study a meta food-web model that was recently…
Individual species may experience diverse outcomes, from prosperity to extinction, in an ecological community subject to external and internal variations. Despite the wealth of theoretical results derived from random matrix ensembles, a…
In ecology it is widely recognised that many landscapes comprise a network of discrete patches of habitat. The species that inhabit the patches interact with each other through a foodweb, the network of feeding interactions. The…
In this letter we give specific examples of Z_N Lotka-Volterra competition models leading to the formation of string networks. We show that, in order to promote coexistence, the species may arrange themselves around regions with a high…
The Lotka-Volterra (LV) model is a simple, robust, and versatile model used to describe large interacting systems such as food webs or microbiomes. The model consists of $n$ coupled differential equations linking the abundances of $n$…
We adapt existing statistical modeling techniques for social networks to study consumption data observed in trophic food webs. These data describe the feeding volume (non-negative) among organisms grouped into nodes, called trophic species,…
Local coexistence of species in large ecosystems is traditionally explained within the broad framework of niche theory. However, its rationale hardly justifies rich biodiversity observed in nearly homogeneous environments. Here we consider…
We introduce an evolutionary metacommunity of multitrophic food webs on several habitats coupled by migration. In contrast to previous studies that focus either on evolutionary or on spatial aspects, we include both and investigate the…
We consider a Lotka-Volterra food chain model with possibly intra-specific competition in a stochastic environment represented by stochastic differential equations. In the non-degenerate setting, this model has already been studied by A.…