Related papers: Theoretical ecology without species
Accurate biodiversity monitoring is essential for effective environmental policy, yet current practices often rely on arbitrarily defined ecosystems, communities, and ad-hoc indicator species, limiting cost-efficiency and reproducibility.…
In 1972, Robert May triggered a worldwide research program studying ecological communities using random matrix theory. Yet, it remains unclear if and when we can treat real communities as random ecosystems. Here, we draw on recent progress…
The dissertation extrapolates the theory of self-organization in biological organisms to sociopolitical self-organization, in human social systems. It is stated that the latter is the best way to organize human social systems, given their…
Systems with a complex dynamics like glasses or models of biological evolution are often pictured in terms of complex landscapes, with a large number of possible collective states. We show on the example of a stochastic spin model with…
Bipartite networks provide an insightful representation of many systems, ranging from mutualistic networks of species interactions to investment networks in finance. The analysis of their topological structures has revealed the ubiquitous…
A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special conceptual challenges because of the strong mutual influences…
Nature has found one method of organizing living matter, but maybe other options exist -- not yet discovered -- on how to create life. To study the life "as it could be" is the objective of an interdisciplinary field called Artificial Life…
Within the decoherence theory we investigate the physical background of the condition of the separability (diagonalizability in noncorrelated basis) of the interaction Hamiltonian of the composite system, "system plus environment". It…
Transformations to create more sustainable social-ecological systems are urgently needed. Structural change is a feature of transformations of social-ecological systems that is of critical importance but is little understood. Here, we…
This article develops a new mathematical method for holistic analysis of nonlinear dynamic compartmental systems through the system decomposition theory. The method is based on the novel dynamic system and subsystem partitioning…
Understanding the dynamical behavior of complex systems is of exceptional relevance in everyday life, from biology to economy. In order to describe the dynamical organization of complex systems, existing methods require the knowledge of the…
We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems to evolve…
A system made up of N interacting species is considered. Self-reaction terms are assumed of the logistic type. Pairwise interactions take place among species according to different modalities, thus yielding a complex asymmetric disordered…
Constructivist philosophy and Hasok Chang's active scientific realism are used to argue that the idea of "truth" in cluster analysis depends on the context and the clustering aims. Different characteristics of clusterings are required in…
The system decomposition theory has recently been developed for the dynamic analysis of nonlinear compartmental systems. The application of this theory to the ecosystem analysis has also been introduced in a separate article. Based on this…
Unlike many physical nonequilibrium systems, in biological systems, the coupling to external energy sources is not a fixed parameter but adaptively controlled by the system itself. We do not have theoretical frameworks that allow for such…
Complex systems and their underlying convoluted networks are ubiquitous, all we need is an eye for them. They pose problems of organized complexity which cannot be approached with a reductionist method. Complexity science and its emergent…
The living-together of distinct organisms in a single termite nest along with the termite builder colony, is emblematic in its ecological and evolutionary significance. On top of preserving biodiversity, these interspecific and…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
Several authors have hypothesized that ecological systems are subject to thermodynamic optimization, which, if proven correct, could represent a long sought general principle of organization in ecology. Although there have been recent…