Related papers: Food web assembly rules
The self-protection of alliances against external invaders is a key concept behind the maintenance of biodiversity in the face of natural selection. But since these alliances, which can be formed by different numbers of competitors, can…
To understand the mechanisms underlying species coexistence, ecologists often study invasion growth rates of theoretical and data-driven models. These growth rates correspond to average per-capita growth rates of one species with respect to…
Species sharing a prey or a predator species may go extinct due to exploitative or apparent competition. We examine whether evolution of the shared species acts as a coexistence mechanism and to what extent the answer depends on the genetic…
The overwhelming success of the web 2.0, with online social networks as key actors, has induced a paradigm shift in the nature of human interactions. The user-driven character of these services for the first time has allowed researchers to…
Competitive interactions represent one of the driving forces behind evolution and natural selection in biological and sociological systems. For example, animals in an ecosystem may vie for food or mates; in a market economy, firms may…
Quantitative predictions about the processes that promote species coexistence are a subject of active research in ecology. In particular, competitive interactions are known to shape and maintain ecological communities, and situations where…
If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…
The properties of competition models where all individuals are identical are relatively well-understood; however, juveniles and adults can experience or generate competition differently. We study here less well-known structured competition…
Recent work draws attention to community-community encounters ("coalescence") as likely an important factor shaping natural ecosystems. This work builds on MacArthur's classic model of competitive coexistence to investigate such…
Food webs with intraguild predation (IGP) are widespread in natural habitats. Their adaptation and resilience behaviour is principal for understanding restructuring of ecological communities. In spite of the importance of IGP food webs…
We present results contrasting food webs constructed using the same model where the source of species was either evolution or immigration from a previously evolved species pool. The overall structure of the webs are remarkably similar,…
Mutualistic networks are formed when the interactions between two classes of species are mutually beneficial. They are important examples of cooperation shaped by evolution. Mutualism between animals and plants plays a key role in the…
A detailed analysis of three species-rich ecosystem food webs has shown that they display scale-free distributions of connections. Such graphs of interaction are in fact shared by a number of biological and technological networks, which…
A fundamental problem in community ecology is to understand how ecological processes such as selection, drift, and immigration give rise to observed patterns in species composition and diversity. Here, we present a simple, analytically…
Many natural ecosystems harbor large numbers of coexisting species competing for far fewer distinct resources, in apparent defiance of the competitive exclusion principle. Various mechanisms have been proposed to explain this apparent…
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…
A theory of relative species abundance on sparsely-connected networks is presented by investigating the replicator dynamics with symmetric interactions. Sparseness of a network involves difficulty in analyzing the fixed points of the…
We consider a dynamical system obtained by the random switching between $N$ Lotka-Volterra food chains. Our key assumption will be that at least two vector fields only differ on the resources allocated to the growth rate of the first…
The distributions of species lifetimes and species in space are related, since species with good local survival chances have more time to colonize new habitats and species inhabiting large areas have higher chances to survive local…
Metapopulation models have been instrumental in demonstrating the ecological impact of landscape structure on the survival of a focal species in complex environments. However, extensions to multiple species with arbitrary dispersal networks…