Related papers: Diversity waves in collapse-driven population dyna…

Geographic barriers prevent migration between populations, thereby facilitating speciation through allopatry. However, these barriers can exhibit dynamic behavior in nature, promoting cycles of expansion and contraction of populations. Such…

Explaining the wide range of dynamics observed in ecological communities is challenging due to the large number of species involved, the complex network of interactions among them, and the influence of multiple environmental variables.…

In the standard minority game, every agent switches to his best strategy in hand at each time step. If only a small number of agents are allowed to switch their strategies at each time step, the population variance of the system plunges.…

Spatially resolved genetic data is increasingly used to reconstruct the migrational history of species. To assist such inference, we study, by means of simulations and analytical methods, the dynamics of neutral gene frequencies in a…

Species populations often modify their environment as they grow. When environmental feedback operates more slowly than population growth, the system can undergo boom-bust dynamics, where the population overshoots its carrying capacity and…

Community assembly is studied using individual-based multispecies models. The models have stochastic population dynamics with mutation, migration, and extinction of species. Mutants appear as a result of mutation of the resident species,…

Until recently, much of the microbial world was hidden from view. A global research effort has changed this, unveiling and quantifying microbial diversity across enormous range of critically-important contexts, from the human microbiome, to…

The behavior of interacting populations typically displays irregular temporal and spatial patterns that are difficult to reconcile with an underlying deterministic dynamics. A classical example is the heterogeneous distribution of plankton…

Darwinian evolution can be modeled in general terms as a flow in the space of fitness (i.e. reproductive rate) distributions. In the diffusion approximation, Tsimring et al. have showed that this flow admits "fitness wave" solutions:…

A key question in the current diversity crisis is how diversity has been maintained throughout evolution and how to preserve it. Modern coexistence theories suggest that a high invasion rate of rare new types is directly related to…

Why do human populations remain vulnerable to collapse, even when they are large? Classical demographic theory predicts that volatility in growth should decline rapidly with size due to the averaging effects of the law of large numbers. As…

I study a population model in which the reproduction rate lambda is inherited with mutation, favoring fast reproducers in the short term, but conflicting with a process that eliminates agglomerations of individuals. The model is a variant…

Cooperation is a difficult proposition in the face of Darwinian selection. Those that defect have an evolutionary advantage over cooperators who should therefore die out. However, spatial structure enables cooperators to survive through the…

An emerging paradigm proposes that neural computations can be understood at the level of dynamical systems that govern low-dimensional trajectories of collective neural activity. How the connectivity structure of a network determines the…

We present a two-species population model in a well-mixed environment where the dynamics involves, in addition to birth and death, changes due to environmental factors and inter-species interactions. The novel dynamical components are…

Dispersal of species to find a more favorable habitat is important in population dynamics. Dispersal rates evolve in response to the relative success of different dispersal strategies. In a simplified deterministic treatment (J. Dockery, V.…

The statistical properties of an ecosystem composed of species interacting via pairwise, random interactions and deterministic, concentration limiting self-interaction are studied analytically with tools of equilibrium statistical mechanics…

We analyze the population dynamics of a broad class of fitness functions that exhibit epochal evolution---a dynamical behavior, commonly observed in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes, in which long periods of stasis in an…

Source-sink systems are metapopulations of habitat patches with different, and possibly temporally varying, habitat qualities, which are commonly used in ecology to study the fate of spatially extended natural populations. We propose new…

A new model ecosystem consisting of many interacting species is introduced. The species are connected through a random matrix with a given connectivity. It is shown that the system is organized close to a boundary of marginal stability in…