Related papers: Humans: the hyper-dense species
Extremal principles are fundamental in our interpretation of phenomena in nature. One of the best known examples is the second law of thermodynamics, governing most physical and chemical systems and stating the continuous increase of…
Two species with similar resource requirements respond in a characteristic way to variations in their habitat -- their abundances rise and fall in concert. We use this idea to learn how bacterial populations in the microbiota respond to…
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…
Ecological and evolutionary processes show various population dynamics depending on internal interactions and environmental changes. While crucial in predicting biological processes, discovering general relations for such nonlinear dynamics…
Humans are the ultimate ecosystem engineers who have profoundly transformed the world's landscapes in order to enhance their survival. Somewhat paradoxically, however, sometimes the unforeseen effect of this ecosystem engineering is the…
We present numerical results based on a simplified ecological system in evolution, showing features of extinction similar to that claimed for the biosystem on Earth. In the model each species consists of a population in interaction with the…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
Motivated by the climate crisis that is currently ravaging the planet, we propose and analyze a novel framework for the evolution of anthropogenic climate impact in which the evolution of human environmental behavior and environmental…
Population dynamics is constrained by the environment, which needs to obey certain conditions to support population growth. We consider a standard model for the evolution of a single species population density, that includes reproduction,…
Understanding how size influences the internal characteristics of a system is a crucial concern across various fields. Concepts like scale invariance, universalities, and fractals are fundamental to this inquiry and find application in…
Ecosystems are formed by networks of species and their interactions. Traditional models of such interactions assume a constant interaction strength between a given pair of species. However, there is often significant trait variation among…
The "Law of the Minimum" states that growth is controlled by the scarcest resource (limiting factor). This concept was originally applied to plant or crop growth (Justus von Liebig, 1840) and quantitatively supported by many experiments.…
Free-ranging dogs (Canis familiaris) thrive in diverse landscapes, including those heavily modified by humans. This study investigated the influence of resource availability on their spatial ecology across 52 rural and 41 urban sites,…
Group living animals form aggregations and flocks that remain cohesive in spite of internal movements of individuals. This is possible because individual group members repeatedly adjust their position and motion in response to the position…
Human dynamics and sociophysics suggest statistical models that may explain and provide us with better insight into social phenomena. Here we tackle the problem of determining the distribution of the population density of a social space…
Many populations, e.g. of cells, bacteria, viruses, or replicating DNA molecules, start small, from a few individuals, and grow large into a noticeable fraction of the environmental carrying capacity $K$. Typically, the elements of the…
The spatial dispersal of individuals is known to play an important role in the dynamics of populations, and is central to metapopulation theory. At the same time, local adaptation to environmental conditions creates a geographic mosaic of…
Despite the long history of modelling human mobility, we continue to lack a highly accurate approach with low data requirements for predicting mobility patterns in cities. Here, we present a population-weighted opportunities model without…
Biological evolution is realised through the same mechanisms of birth and death that underlie change in population density. The deep interdependence between ecology and evolution is well-established, and recent models focus on integrating…
We design a stochastic individual-based model structured in energy, for single species consuming an external resource, where populations are characterized by a typical energy at birth in $\mathbb{R}^{*}_{+}$. The resource is maintained at a…