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Entropy measures of probability distributions are widely used measures in ecology, biology, genetics, and in other fields, to quantify species diversity of a community. Unfortunately, entropy-based diversity indices, or diversity indices…
We develop a theoretical framework to understand the persistence and coexistence of competitive species in a spatially explicit metacommunity model with a heterogeneous dispersal kernel. Our analysis, based on methods from the physics of…
We introduce the first analytical model of asymmetric community dynamics to yield Hubbell's neutral theory in the limit of functional equivalence among all species. Our focus centers on an asymmetric extension of Hubbell's local community…
Quantifying diversity is of central importance for the study of structure, function and evolution of microbial communities. The estimation of microbial diversity has received renewed attention with the advent of large-scale metagenomic…
Measures of biodiversity change such as the Living Planet Index describe proportional change in the abundance of a typical species, which can be thought of as change in the size of a community. Here, I discuss the orthogonal concept of…
Diversity indices are useful single-number metrics for characterizing a complex distribution of a set of attributes across a population of interest. The utility of these different metrics or sets of metrics depend on the context and…
Moran or Wright-Fisher processes are probably the most well known model to study the evolution of a population under various effects. Our object of study will be the Simpson index which measures the level of diversity of the population, one…
Modularity is widely used to effectively measure the strength of the community structure found by community detection algorithms. However, modularity maximization suffers from two opposite yet coexisting problems: in some cases, it tends to…
Difficulties identifying appropriate biodiversity impact metrics remain a major barrier to inclusion of biodiversity considerations in environmentally responsible investment. We propose and analyse a simple science-based local metric: the…
Understanding the role of demographic diversity in group settings requires effective quantitative metrics. Intersectional feminist theory has highlighted that demographic identities can intersect in complex ways, but most metrics used to…
In recent years, the concepts of ``diversity'' and ``inclusion'' have attracted considerable attention across a range of fields, encompassing both social and biological disciplines. To fully understand these concepts, it is critical to not…
Similarity index is an important scientific tool frequently used to determine whether different pairs of entities are similar with respect to some prefixed characteristics. Some standard measures of similarity index include Jaccard index,…
Clusters or communities can provide a coarse-grained description of complex systems at multiple scales, but their detection remains challenging in practice. Community detection methods often define communities as dense subgraphs, or…
Many natural patterns, such as the distributions of blood particles in a blood sample, proteins on cell surfaces, biological populations in their habitat, galaxies in the universe, the sequence of human genes, and the fitness in…
The area of population dynamics has a rich history of the development and analysis of models of biological and social phenomena using ordinary differential equations. This paper describes a method for understanding the influence one…
The growing popularity of online social networks has provided researchers with access to large amount of social network data. This, coupled with the ever increasing computation speed, storage capacity and data mining capabilities, led to…
Stability is a desirable property of complex ecosystems. If a community of interacting species is at a stable equilibrium point then it is able to withstand small perturbations to component species' abundances without suffering adverse…
Coevolutionary dynamics is investigated in chemical catalysis, biological evolution, social and economic systems. The dynamics of these systems can be analyzed within the unifying framework of evolutionary game theory. In this Letter, we…
We present a strategy capable of describing basic features of the dynamics of crowds. The behaviour of the crowd is considered from a twofold perspective. We examine both the large scale behaviour of the crowd, and phenomena happening at…
Several theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explain observed biodiversity patterns, ranging from the classical niche-based theories, mainly employing a continuous formalism, to neutral theories, based on statistical mechanics of…