Related papers: Interaction patterns and diversity in assembled ec…
We use a generalised version of the individual-based Tangled Nature model of evolutionary ecology to study the relationship between ecosystem structure and evolutionary history. Our evolved model ecosystems typically exhibit interaction…
One of the central questions of metacommunity theory is how dispersal of organisms affects species diversity. Here we show that the diversity-dispersal relationship should not be studied in isolation of other abiotic and biotic flows in the…
The robustness of an ecological network quantifies the resilience of the ecosystem it represents to species loss. It corresponds to the proportion of species that are disconnected from the rest of the network when extinctions occur…
We study the (hydro-)dynamics of multi-species driven by alignment. What distinguishes the different species is the protocol of their interaction with the rest of the crowd: the collective motion is described by different communication…
Cooperation is a persistent behavioral pattern of entities pooling and sharing resources. Its ubiquity in nature poses a conundrum. Whenever two entities cooperate, one must willingly relinquish something of value to the other. Why is this…
The population size ("abundance") of wildlife species has central interest in ecological research and management. Distance sampling is a dominant approach to the estimation of wildlife abundance for many vertebrate animal species. One…
The far-reaching consequences of ecological interactions in the dynamics of biological communities remain an intriguing subject. For decades, competition has been a cornerstone in ecological processes, but mounting evidence shows that…
In biology, the evolution of increasingly cooperative groups has shaped the history of life. Genes collaborate in the control of cells; cells efficiently divide tasks to produce cohesive multicellular individuals; individual members of…
Science is increasingly dominated by teams. Understanding patterns of scientific collaboration and their impacts on the productivity and evolution of disciplines is crucial to understand scientific processes. Electronic bibliography offers…
Commonly recognized evolutionarily relevant effects of sexual reproduction include increased diversity, accelerated adaptation, and constrained accumulation of deleterious mutations, along with a secondary effect of species genotype…
Evolutionary adaptation is the process that increases the fit of a population to the fitness landscape it inhabits. As a consequence, evolutionary dynamics is shaped, constrained, and channeled, by that fitness landscape. Much work has been…
Organisms from microbes to humans engage in a variety of social behaviors, which affect fitness in complex, often nonlinear ways. The question of how these behaviors evolve has consequences ranging from antibiotic resistance to human…
Many complex systems are characterized by broad distributions capturing, for example, the size of firms, the population of cities or the degree distribution of complex networks. Typically this feature is explained by means of a preferential…
This is an introduction to the special issue titled "Collective behavior and evolutionary games" that is in the making at Chaos, Solitons & Fractals. The term collective behavior covers many different phenomena in nature and society. From…
Global environmental change is affecting species distribution and their interactions with other species. In particular, the main drivers of environmental change strongly affect the strength of interspecific interactions with considerable…
We consider the concept of mutual information in ecological networks, and use this idea to analyse the Tangled Nature model of co-evolution. We show that this measure of correlation has two distinct behaviours depending on how we define the…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
The abundance of different species in a community often follows the log series distribution. Other ecological patterns also have simple forms. Why does the complexity and variability of ecological systems reduce to such simplicity? Common…
Social interaction increases significantly the performance of a wide range of cooperative systems. However, evidence that natural swarms limit the number of social connections suggests potentially detrimental consequences of excessive…
We consider the population dynamics of a set of species whose network of catalytic interactions is described by a directed graph. The relationship between the attractors of this dynamics and the underlying graph theoretic structures like…