Related papers: Expansion under climate change: the genetic conseq…
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…
We study the effect that disturbances in the ecological landscape exert on the spatial distribution of a population that evolves according to the nonlocal FKPP equation. Using both numerical and analytical techniques, we explore the three…
When mutation rates are low, natural selection remains effective, and increasing the mutation rate can give rise to an increase in adaptation rate. When mutation rates are high to begin with, however, increasing the mutation rate may have a…
Geographic structure can affect patterns of genetic differentiation and speciation rates. In this article, we investigate the dynamics of genetic distances in a geographically structured metapopulation. We model the metapopulation as a…
Essential to each other, growth and exploration are jointly observed in populations, be it alive such as animals and cells or inanimate such as goods and money. But their ability to move, crucial to cope with uncertainty and optimize…
Species introductions promote secondary contacts between taxa with long histories of allopatric divergence. Anthropogenic contact zones thus offer valuable contrasts to speciation studies in natural systems where past spatial isolations may…
Dryland vegetation can survive water stress by forming spatial patterns but is often subjected to herbivory as an additional stress that puts it at risk of desertification. Understanding the mutual relationships between vegetation…
Coral reefs are crucial to marine biodiversity and rely on a delicate symbiotic relationship between corals and zooxanthellae algae. Water temperature variations, however, disrupt this association, leading to coral bleaching events that…
The spatial scale of population synchrony gives the characteristic distance at which the population fluctuations are correlated. Therefore, it gives also the characteristic size of the regions of simultaneous population depletion, or even…
Habitat fragmentation, often driven by human activities, alters ecological landscapes by disrupting connectivity and reshaping species interactions. In such fragmented environments, habitats can be modeled as networks, where individuals…
The intensification and increased frequency of weather extremes is emerging as one of the most important aspects of climate change. We use Monte Carlo simulation to understand and predict the consequences of variations in trends (i.e.,…
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…
Models in evolutionary game theory traditionally assume symmetric interactions in homogeneous environments. Here, we consider populations evolving in a heterogeneous environment, which consists of patches of different qualities that are…
Although many phenotypic traits are determined by a large number of genetic variants, how a polygenic trait adapts in response to the changes in the environment is still poorly understood. Here we study the adaptation dynamics of a…
Species complexes are groups of closely related populations exchanging genes through dispersal. We study the dynamics of the structure of species complexes in a class of metapopulation models where demes can exchange genetic material…
Here we describe how some important scaling laws observed in the distribution of languages on Earth can emerge from a simple computer simulation. The proposed language dynamics includes processes of selective geographic colonization,…
The role of the selection pressure and mutation amplitude on the behavior of a single-species population evolving on a two-dimensional lattice, in a periodically changing environment, is studied both analytically and numerically. The…
Phylogenetic diversity is a measure for describing how much of an evolutionary tree is spanned by a subset of species. If one applies this to the (unknown) subset of current species that will still be present at some future time, then this…
We consider evolution of a large population, where fitness of each organism is defined by many phenotypical traits. These traits result from expression of many genes. We propose a new model of gene regulation, where gene expression is…
Species introductions to new habitats can cause a decline in the population size of competing native species and consequently also in their genetic diversity. We are interested in why these adverse effects are weak in some cases whereas in…