Related papers: Biodiversity, extinctions and evolution of ecosyst…
We consider an aggregation model for two interacting species. The coupling between the species is via their velocities, that incorporate self- and cross-interactions. Our main interest is categorizing the possible steady states of the…
The extinction of species is a major problem of concern with a large literature. Our investigation gives insight into when species extinctions must occur, with an emphasis on determining which species might possibly die out and on how fast…
The distributions of species lifetimes and species in space are related, since species with good local survival chances have more time to colonize new habitats and species inhabiting large areas have higher chances to survive local…
Biological networks of interacting agents exhibit similar topological properties for a wide range of scales, from cellular to ecological levels, suggesting the existence of a common evolutionary origin. A general evolutionary mechanism…
Many types of bacteria can survive under stress by switching stochastically between two different phenotypes: the "normals" who multiply fast, but are vulnerable to stress, and the "persisters" who hardly multiply, but are resilient to…
If predictions for species extinctions hold, then the `tree of life' today may be quite different to that in (say) 100 years. We describe a technique to quantify how much each species is likely to contribute to future biodiversity, as…
Coexistence of individuals with different species or phenotypes is often found in nature in spite of competition between them. Stable coexistence of multiple types of individuals have implications for maintenance of ecological biodiversity…
In any ecosystem, the conditions of the environment and the characteristics of the species that inhabit it are entangled, co-evolving in space and time. We introduce a model that couples active agents with a dynamic environment, interpreted…
The causes of major and rapid transitions observed in biological macroevolution as well as in the evolution of social systems are a subject of much debate. Here we identify the proximate causes of crashes and recoveries that arise…
We study a generic reaction-diffusion model for single-species population dynamics that includes reproduction, death, and competition. The population is assumed to be confined in a refuge beyond which conditions are so harsh that they lead…
Local coexistence of species in large ecosystems is traditionally explained within the broad framework of niche theory. However, its rationale hardly justifies rich biodiversity observed in nearly homogeneous environments. Here we consider…
Ecological trade-offs between species are often invoked to explain species coexistence in ecological communities. However, few mathematical models have been proposed for which coexistence conditions can be characterized explicitly in terms…
The complexity of an ecological community can be distilled into a network, where diverse interactions connect species in a web of dependencies. Species interact not only with each other but indirectly through environmental effects, however…
We study a spatially homogeneous model of a market where several agents or companies compete for a wealth resource. In analogy with ecological systems the simplest case of such models shows a kind of "competitive exclusion" principle.…
There has been a long-standing and at times fractious debate whether complex and large systems can be stable. In ecology, the so-called `diversity-stability debate' arose because mathematical analyses of ecosystem stability were either…
The Lotka-Volterra system is a set of ordinary differential equations describing growth of interacting ecological species. This model has gained renewed interest in the context of random interaction networks. One of the debated questions is…
A classic measure of ecological stability describes the tendency of a community to return to equilibrium after small perturbation. While many advances show how the network structure of these communities severely constrains such tendencies,…
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…
In order to model real ecological systems one has to consider many species that interact in complex ways. However, most of the recent theoretical studies have been restricted to few species systems with rather trivial interactions. The few…
Simulations of the coevolution of many interacting species are performed using the Webworld model. The model has a realistic set of predator-prey equations that describe the population dynamics of the species for any structure of the food…