Related papers: Community-level cohesion without cooperation
Nowadays, evidence is mounting that the race of living organisms for adaptation to the chemicals synthesized by their neighbours may drive community structures. Particularly, some bacterial infections and plant invasions disruptive of the…
The significant role of space in maintaining species coexistence and determining community structure and function is well established. However, community ecology studies have mainly focused on simple competition and predation systems, and…
Community ecology has traditionally relied on the competitive exclusion principle, a piece of common wisdom in conceptual frameworks developed to describe species assemblages. Key concepts in community ecology, such as limiting similarity…
Ecologists have put forward many explanations for coexistence, but these are only partial explanations; nature is complex, so it is reasonable to assume that in any given ecological community, multiple mechanisms of coexistence are…
Despite the general acknowledgment of the role of niche and fitness differences in community dynamics, species abundance has been coined as a relevant feature not just regarding niche perspectives, but also according to neutral…
The complexity of an ecological community can be distilled into a network, where diverse interactions connect species in a web of dependencies. Species interact not only with each other but indirectly through environmental effects, however…
Cooperative mutualism is a major force driving evolution and sustaining ecosystems. Although the importance of spatial degrees of freedom and number fluctuations is well-known, their effects on mutualism are not fully understood. With range…
We develop a theoretical framework to understand the persistence and coexistence of competitive species in a spatially explicit metacommunity model with a heterogeneous dispersal kernel. Our analysis, based on methods from the physics of…
We explore the emergence of cooperation in the framework of evolutionary game theory. First we introduce the cooperation problem in a novel way that we believe it have important consequences in how problem is addressed. Then we present a…
Microbial ecosystems exhibit a surprising amount of functionally relevant diversity at all levels of taxonomic resolution, presenting a significant challenge for most modeling frameworks. A long-standing hope of theoretical ecology is that…
Here we present extinction, extirpation and coexistence conditions where / when two communities combine. We consider one specific model where two communities coalesce, and another model where the communities coexist side by side, blending…
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…
Multilevel selection is an important organizing principle that crucially underlies evolutionary processes from the emergence of cells to eusociality and the economics of nations. Previous studies on multilevel selection assumed that the…
Mutualistic networks have attracted increasing attention in the ecological literature in the last decades as they play a key role in the maintenance of biodiversity. Here, we develop an analytical framework to study the structural stability…
Addressing both natural and societal challenges requires collective cooperation. Studies on collective-risk social dilemmas have shown that individual decisions are influenced by the perceived risk of collective failure. However, existing…
What determines biodiversity in nature is a prominent issue in ecology, especially in biotic resource systems that are typically devoid of cross-feeding. Here, we show that by incorporating pairwise encounters among consumer individuals…
Cooperation is ubiquitous ranging from multicellular organisms to human societies. Population structures indicating individuals' limited interaction ranges are crucial to understand this issue. But it is still at large to what extend…
In the analysis of complex ecosystems it is common to use random interaction coefficients, often assumed to be such that all species are statistically equivalent. In this work we relax this assumption by choosing interactions according to…
Microbial communities harbor extensive fine-scale diversity: closely-related strains of the same species coexist alongside many distantly-related taxa. Yet strain coexistence remains poorly understood, largely because most studies neglect…
We introduce various models for cellulose bio-degradation by micro-organisms. Those models rely on complex chemical mechanisms, involve the structure of the cellulose chains and are allowed to depend on the phenotypical traits of the…