Related papers: Communities as cliques
In many natural situations one observes a local system with many competing species which is coupled by weak immigration to a regional species pool. The dynamics of such a system is dominated by its stable and uninvadable (SU) states. When…
We present a numerical analysis of local community assembly through weak migration from a regional species pool. At equilibrium, the local community consists of a subset ("clique") of species from the regional community. Our analysis…
How large ecosystems can create and maintain the remarkable biodiversity we see in nature is probably one of the biggest open questions in science, attracting attention from different fields, from Theoretical Ecology to Mathematics and…
We show how highly-diverse ecological communities may display persistent abundance fluctuations, when interacting through resource competition and subjected to migration from a species pool. This turns out to be closely related to the ratio…
Interactions in natural communities can be highly heterogeneous, with any given species interacting appreciably with only some of the others, a situation commonly represented by sparse interaction networks. We study the consequences of…
Ecological systems comprise an astonishing diversity of species that cooperate or compete with each other forming complex mutual dependencies. The minimum requirements to maintain a large species diversity on long time scales are in general…
A theory of relative species abundance on sparsely-connected networks is presented by investigating the replicator dynamics with symmetric interactions. Sparseness of a network involves difficulty in analyzing the fixed points of the…
A statistical network model with overlapping communities can be generated as a superposition of mutually independent random graphs of varying size. The model is parameterized by the number of nodes, the number of communities, and the joint…
We introduce the first analytical model of asymmetric community dynamics to yield Hubbell's neutral theory in the limit of functional equivalence among all species. Our focus centers on an asymmetric extension of Hubbell's local community…
When a population inhabits an inhomogeneous environment, the fitness value of traits can vary with the position in the environment. Gene flow caused by random mating can nevertheless prevent that a sexually reproducing population splits…
The spatial structure of populations may promote the emergence and maintenance of cooperation. Cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma is favored under specific update rules in evolutionary graph theory models with one individual per node of…
When three species compete cyclically in a well-mixed, stochastic system of $N$ individuals, extinction is known to typically occur at times scaling as the system size $N$. This happens, for example, in rock-paper-scissors games or…
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…
Structure, composition and stability of ecological populations are shaped by the inter- and intra-species interactions within these communities. It remains to be fully understood how the interplay of these interactions with other factors,…
If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…
Understanding the stability of complex communities is a central focus in ecology, many important theoretical advancements have been made to identify drivers of ecological stability. However, previous results often rely on the…
We propose a statistical physics model of a neutral community, where each agent can represent identical plant species growing in the vertical direction with sunlight in the form of rich-get-richer competition. Disturbance added to this…
The processes and mechanisms underlying the origin and maintenance of biological diversity have long been of central importance in ecology and evolution. The competitive exclusion principle states that the number of coexisting species is…
The dynamics of two competing species in a finite size community is one of the most studied problems in population genetics and community ecology. Stochastic fluctuations lead, inevitably, to the extinction of one of the species, but the…
Many decision-making algorithms draw inspiration from the inner workings of individual biological systems. However, it remains unclear whether collective behavior among biological species can also lead to solutions for computational tasks.…