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Species extinction occurs regularly and unavoidably in ecological systems. The time scales for extinction can broadly vary and inform on the ecosystem's stability. We study the spatio-temporal extinction dynamics of a paradigmatic…
In order to understand the role of space in ecological communities where each species produces a certain type of resource and has varying abilities to exploit the resources produced by its own species and by the other species, we carry out…
Explaining the wide range of dynamics observed in ecological communities is challenging due to the large number of species involved, the complex network of interactions among them, and the influence of multiple environmental variables.…
Across plant communities worldwide, fire regimes reflect a combination of climatic factors and plant characteristics. To shed new light on the complex relationships between plant characteristics and fire regimes, we developed a new…
We derive an analytical approximation for making quantitative predictions for ecological communities as a function of the mean intensity of the inter-specific competition and the species richness. This method, with only a fraction of the…
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…
Cyclic, nonhierarchical interactions among biological species represent a general mechanism by which ecosystems are able to maintain high levels of biodiversity. However, species coexistence is often possible only in spatially extended…
Ecological systems are complex dynamical systems. Modelling efforts on ecosystems' dynamical stability have revealed that population dynamics, being highly nonlinear, can be governed by complex fluctuations. Indeed, experimental and field…
May (1974,1976) opened the debate on whether biological populations might exhibit nonlinear dynamics and chaos. However, it has in general been difficult to verify nonlinear dynamics in biological populations. There are many reports…
When can complex ecological interactions drive an entire ecosystem into a persistent non-equilibrium state, where species abundances keep fluctuating without going to extinction? We show that high-diversity spatially-extended systems, in…
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…
Ecosystems often undergo abrupt regime shifts in response to gradual external changes. These shifts are theoretically understood as a regime switch between alternative stable states of the ecosystem dynamical response to smooth changes in…
Species-rich communities, such as the microbiota or microbial ecosystems, provide key functions for human health and climatic resilience. Increasing effort is being dedicated to design experimental protocols for selecting community-level…
Disordered systems theory provides powerful tools to analyze the generic behaviors of highdimensional systems, such as species-rich ecological communities or neural networks. By assuming randomness in their interactions, universality…
Generalizing the cyclically competing three-species model (often referred to as the rock-paper-scissors game), we consider a simple system of population dynamics without spatial structures that involves four species. Unlike the previous…
Quantitative predictions about the processes that promote species coexistence are a subject of active research in ecology. In particular, competitive interactions are known to shape and maintain ecological communities, and situations where…
Artificial ecosystems provide an additional experimental tool to support laboratory work, field work, and theoretical development in competitive exclusion research. A novel application of a spatiotemporal agent based model is presented…
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…
Cooperation is a widespread natural phenomenon yet current evolutionary thinking is dominated by the paradigm of selfish competition. Recent advanced in many fronts of Biology and Non-linear Physics are helping to bring cooperation to its…
Introducing environmental feedback into evolutionary game theory has led to the development of eco-evolutionary games, which have gained popularity due to their ability to capture the intricate interplay between the environment and…