Related papers: Reconciling cooperation, biodiversity and stabilit…
Microbial ecosystems are commonly modeled by fixed interactions between species in steady exponential growth states. However, microbes often modify their environments so strongly that they are forced out of the exponential state into…
Spatially extended population dynamics models that incorporate intrinsic noise serve as case studies for the role of fluctuations and correlations in biological systems. Including spatial structure and stochastic noise in predator-prey…
Game theory ideas provide a useful framework for studying evolutionary dynamics in a well-mixed environment. This approach, however, typically enforces a strictly fixed overall population size, deemphasizing natural growth processes. We…
In complex ecological communities, species may self-organize into clusters or clumps where highly similar species can coexist. The emergence of such species clusters can be captured by the interplay between neutral and niche theories. Based…
The interdependence between an individual strategy decision and the resulting change of environmental state is often a subtle process. Feedback-evolving games have been a prevalent framework for studying such feedback in well-mixed…
Recently we have introduced a simplified model of ecosystem assembly (Capitan et al., 2009) for which we are able to map out all assembly pathways generated by external invasions in an exact manner. In this paper we provide a deeper…
Understanding the stability of complex communities is a central focus in ecology, many important theoretical advancements have been made to identify drivers of ecological stability. However, previous results often rely on the…
Ecological resilience refers to the ability of a system to retain its state when subject to state variables perturbations or parameter changes. While understanding and quantifying resilience is crucial to anticipate the possible regime…
When three species compete cyclically in a well-mixed, stochastic system of $N$ individuals, extinction is known to typically occur at times scaling as the system size $N$. This happens, for example, in rock-paper-scissors games or…
A dynamical model of an ecological community is analyzed within a "mean-field approximation" in which one of the species interacts with the combination of all of the other species in the community. Within this approximation the model may be…
Ecosystems frequently display the coexistence of diverse species under resource competition, typically resulting in skewed distributions of rarity and abundance. A potential driver of such coexistence is environmental fluctuations that…
Explaining the emergence of self-organized biodiversity and species abundance distribution patterns remians a fundamental challenge in ecology. While classical frameworks, such as neutral theory and models based on pairwise species…
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…
Real ecosystems are characterized by sparse and asymmetric interactions, posing a major challenge to theoretical analysis. We introduce a new method to study the generalized Lotka-Volterra model with stochastic dynamics on sparse graphs. By…
In recent years there has been a growing interest in the study of the dynamics of stochastic populations. A key question in population biology is to understand the conditions under which populations coexist or go extinct. Theoretical and…
Classical models for competition between two species usually predict exclusion or divergent evolution of resource exploitation. However, recent experimental data show that coexistence is possible for very similar species competing for the…
The rapid advancement of environmental sequencing technologies, such as metagenomics, has significantly enhanced our ability to study microbial communities. The eubiotic composition of these communities is crucial for maintaining ecological…
Despite the general acknowledgment of the role of niche and fitness differences in community dynamics, species abundance has been coined as a relevant feature not just regarding niche perspectives, but also according to neutral…
Microbes providing public goods are widespread in nature despite running the risk of being exploited by free-riders. However, the precise ecological factors supporting cooperation are still puzzling. Following recent experiments, we…
Models of coordinated behavior of populations living in the same environment are introduced for the cases when they either compete with each other, or they both gain by mutual interactions, or finally when one hunts the other one. The…