Related papers: A phenomenological spatial model for macro-ecologi…
Classical ecological theory predicts that environmental stochasticity increases extinction risk by reducing the average per-capita growth rate of populations. To understand the interactive effects of environmental stochasticity, spatial…
Empirical observations show that ecological communities can have a huge number of coexisting species, also with few or limited number of resources. These ecosystems are characterized by multiple type of interactions, in particular…
Empirical observations show that ecological communities can have a huge number of coexisting species, also with few or limited number of resources. These ecosystems are characterized by multiple type of interactions, in particular…
Self-arrangement of individuals into spatial patterns often accompanies and promotes species diversity in ecological systems. Here, we investigate pattern formation arising from cyclic dominance of three species, operating near a…
Spatially extended population dynamics models that incorporate intrinsic noise serve as case studies for the role of fluctuations and correlations in biological systems. Including spatial structure and stochastic noise in predator-prey…
The composition of ecological communities varies not only between different locations but also in time. Understanding the fundamental processes that drive species towards rarity or abundance is crucial to assessing ecosystem resilience and…
We study the spatial pattern formation and emerging long range correlations in a model of three species coevolving in space and time according to stochastic contact rules. Analytical results for the pair correlation functions, based on a…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
Traditional approaches to ecosystem modelling have relied on spatially homogeneous approximations to interaction, growth and death. More recently, spatial interaction and dispersal have also been considered. While these leads to certain…
Climate changes may affect ecosystems destabilising relationships among species. We investigate the spatial rock-paper-scissors models with a regional unevenness that reduces the selection capacity of organisms of one species. Our results…
A dynamical model of an ecological community is analyzed within a "mean-field approximation" in which one of the species interacts with the combination of all of the other species in the community. Within this approximation the model may be…
A class of models for large-scale evolution and mass extinctions is presented. These models incorporate environmental changes on all scales, from influences on a single species to global effects. This is a step towards a unified picture of…
Discrete time, spatially extended models play an important role in ecology, modelling population dynamics of species ranging from micro-organisms to birds. An important question is how 'bottom up', individual-based models can be…
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…
We propose a model based on coupled multiplicative stochastic processes to understand the dynamics of competing species in an ecosystem. This process can be conveniently described by a Fokker-Planck equation. We provide an analytical…
Inferring the processes underlying the emergence of observed patterns is a key challenge in theoretical ecology. Much effort has been made in the past decades to collect extensive and detailed information about the spatial distribution of…
Ecological systems show a variety of characteristic patterns of biodiversity in space and time. It is a challenge for theory to find models that can reproduce and explain the observed patterns. Since the advent of island biogeography these…
We study the statistics of ecosystems with a variable number of co-evolving species. The species interact in two ways: by prey-predator relationships and by direct competition with similar kinds. The interaction coefficients change slowly…
Highly-diverse ecosystems exhibit a broad distribution of population sizes and species turnover, where species at high and low abundances are exchanged over time. We show that these two features generically emerge in the fluctuating phase…
Spatial metapopulation models are fundamental to theoretical ecology, enabling to study how landscape structure influences global species dynamics. Traditional models, including recent generalizations, often rely on the deterministic limit…