Related papers: Linking evolutionary and ecological theory illumin…

Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…

The magnitude and variability of Earth's biodiversity have puzzled scientists ever since paleontologic fossil databases became available. We identify and study a model of interdependent species where both endogenous and exogenous impacts…

The origin of diversification and coexistence of genes and species have been traditionally studied in isolated biological levels. Ecological and evolutionary views have focused on the mechanisms that enable or constrain species coexistence,…

Ecosystems display a complex spatial organization. Ecologists have long tried to characterize them by looking at how different measures of biodiversity change across spatial scales. Ecological neutral theory has provided simple predictions…

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…

In abstract terms, ecosystem ecology is about determining when two ecosystems, superficially different, are alike in some deeper way. An external observer can choose any ecosystem property as being important. In contrast, two ecosystems are…

1) Micro-evolutionary predictions are complicated by ecological feedbacks like density dependence, while ecological predictions can be complicated by evolutionary change. A widely used approach in micro-evolution, quantitative genetics,…

How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…

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…

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…

Despite its radical assumption of ecological equivalence between species, neutral biodiversity theory can often provide good fits to species abundance distributions observed in nature. Major criticisms of neutral theory have focused on…

Evolutionary biology shares many concepts with statistical physics: both deal with populations, whether of molecules or organisms, and both seek to simplify evolution in very many dimensions. Often, methodologies have undergone parallel and…

The basic mechanics of evolution have been understood since Darwin. But debate continues over whether macroevolutionary phenomena are driven primary by the fitness structure of genotype space or by ecological interaction. In this paper we…

Motivated by the results of recent laboratory experiments (Yoshida et al. Nature, 424, 303-306 (2003)) as well as many earlier field observations that evolutionary changes can take place in ecosystems over relatively short ecological time…

Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…

1. Theoretical models pertaining to feedbacks between ecological and evolutionary processes are prevalent in multiple biological fields. An integrative overview is currently lacking, due to little crosstalk between the fields and the use of…

Species' interactions are shaped by their traits. Thus, we expect traits -- in particular, trait (dis)similarity -- to play a central role in determining whether a particular set of species coexists. Traits are, in turn, the outcome of an…

Due to the conventional distinction between ecological (rapid) and evolutionary (slow)timescales, ecological and population models to date have typically ignored the effects of evolution. Yet the potential for rapid evolutionary change has…

We study macroevolutionary dynamics by extending microevolutionary competition models to long time scales. It has been shown that for a general class of competition models, gradual evolutionary change in continuous phenotypes (evolutionary…

We introduce a simple computational model that, with a microscopic dynamics driven by natural selection and mutation alone, allows the description of true speciation events. A statistical analysis of the so generated evolutionary tree…