Related papers: Comparing process-based and constraint-based appro…

We discuss the relevance of studying ecology within the framework of Complexity Science from a statistical mechanics approach. Ecology is concerned with understanding how systems level properties emerge out of the multitude of interactions…

Despite its radical assumption of ecological equivalence between species, neutral biodiversity theory can often provide good fits to species abundance distributions observed in nature. Major criticisms of neutral theory have focused on…

Ecological networks such as plant-pollinator systems and food webs vary in space and time. This variability includes fluctuations in global network properties such as total number and intensity of interactions but also in the local…

In abstract terms, ecosystem ecology is about determining when two ecosystems, superficially different, are alike in some deeper way. An external observer can choose any ecosystem property as being important. In contrast, two ecosystems are…

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…

Understanding the emergence of biodiversity patterns in nature is a central problem in biology. Theoretical models of speciation have addressed this question in the macroecological scale, but little has been investigated in the…

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…

Ecological communities exhibit pervasive patterns and inter-relationships between size, abundance, and the availability of resources. We use scaling ideas to develop a unified, model-independent framework for understanding the distribution…

Food webs are complex ecological networks whose structure is both ecologically and statistically constrained, with many network properties being correlated with each other. Despite the recognition of these invariable relationships in food…

Preserving biodiversity and ecosystem stability is a challenge that can be pursued through modern statistical mechanics modeling. Here we introduce a variational maximum entropy-based algorithm to evaluate the entropy in a minimal ecosystem…

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…

Species extinction is a core process that affects the diversity of life on Earth. Competition between species in a population is considered by ecological niche-based theories as a key factor leading to different severity of species…

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…

The biological requirements for an ecosystem to develop and maintain species diversity are in general unknown. Here we consider a model ecosystem of sessile and mutually excluding organisms competing for space [Mathiesen et al. Phys. Rev.…

Spatial ecological networks are widely used to model interactions between georeferenced biological entities (e.g., populations or communities). The analysis of such data often leads to a two-step approach where groups containing similar…

Highly-diverse ecosystems exhibit a broad distribution of population sizes and species turnover, where species at high and low abundances are exchanged over time. We show that these two features generically emerge in the fluctuating phase…

Population-level scaling in ecological systems arises from individual growth and death with competitive constraints. We build on a minimal dynamical model of metabolic growth where the tension between individual growth and mortality…

The rise of trait-based ecology has led to an increased focus on the distribution and dynamics of traits in communities. However, a general theory of trait-based ecology, that can apply across different scales (e.g., species that differ in…

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…

We study a model ecosystem by means of dynamical techniques from disordered systems theory. The model describes a set of species subject to competitive interactions through a background of resources, which they feed upon. Additionally…