Related papers: Theoretical ecology without species
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…
Ecosystems are formed by networks of species and their interactions. Traditional models of such interactions assume a constant interaction strength between a given pair of species. However, there is often significant trait variation among…
The standard assumptions that underlie many conceptual and quantitative frameworks do not hold for many complex physical, biological, and social systems. Complex systems science clarifies when and why such assumptions fail and provides…
We introduce several axioms which may or may not hold for any given subgraph of the directed graph of all organisms (past, present and future) where edges represent biological parenthood, with the simplifying background assumption that life…
A primary motivation for research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of natural ecosystems. Ecosystems arc thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex, dynamic…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
The rapid advancement of environmental sequencing technologies, such as metagenomics, has significantly enhanced our ability to study microbial communities. The eubiotic composition of these communities is crucial for maintaining ecological…
The myriad microscopic interactions among the individual organisms that constitute an ecological system collectively give rise, at the macroscopic scale, to evolutionary trends. The ability to detect the directionality of such trends is…
Theoretical ecologists have long leveraged empirical data in various forms to advance ecology. Recently increased volumes and access to ecological data present an expanding set of opportunities for theoreticians to inform model development,…
In-depth studies of sociotechnical systems are largely limited to single instances. Network surveys are expensive, and platforms vary in important ways, from interface design, to social norms, to historical contingencies. With single…
Diversity is a fundamental feature of ecosystems, even when the concept of ecosystem is extended to sociology or economics. Diversity can be intended as the count of different items, animals, or, more generally, interactions. There are two…
The infrastructure upon which the functioning of society depends is composed of complex ecosystems of systems. Consequently, we must reason about the properties of such ecosystems, which requires that we construct models of them. There are…
Joint species distribution models are popular in ecology for modeling covariate effects on species occurrence, while characterizing cross-species dependence. Data consist of multivariate binary indicators of the occurrences of different…
A primary motivation for our research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. Ecosystems are thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex,…
Ecosystems are among the most interesting and well-studied examples of self-organized complex systems. Community ecology, the study of how species interact with each other and the environment, has a rich tradition. Over the last few years,…
In complex ecological communities, species may self-organize into clusters or clumps where highly similar species can coexist. The emergence of such species clusters can be captured by the interplay between neutral and niche theories. Based…
We introduce a mathematical model of symbiosis between different species by taking into account the influence of each species on the carrying capacities of the others. The modeled entities can pertain to biological and ecological societies…
Mutualistic interactions, which are beneficial for both interacting species, are recurrently present in ecosystems. Observations of natural systems showed that, if we draw mutualistic relationships as binary links between species, the…
Several theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explain observed biodiversity patterns, ranging from the classical niche-based theories, mainly employing a continuous formalism, to neutral theories, based on statistical mechanics of…
We discuss a simple model of co-evolution. In order to emphasise the effect of interaction between individuals the entire population is subjected to the same physical environment. Species are emergent structures and extinction, origination…