Related papers: Reconciling cooperation, biodiversity and stabilit…
We study a model ecosystem by means of dynamical techniques from disordered systems theory. The model describes a set of species subject to competitive interactions through a background of resources, which they feed upon. Additionally…
Mutualistic interactions, where individuals from different species can benefit from each other, are widespread across ecosystems. This study develops a general deterministic model of mutualism involving two populations, assuming that…
With limited resources, competition is widespread, yet cooperation persists across taxa, from microorganisms to large mammals. Recent observations reveal contingent factors often drive cooperative interactions, with the intensity…
We study species abundance in the empirical plant-pollinator mutualistic networks exhibiting broad degree distributions, with uniform intra-group competition assumed, by the Lotka-Volterra equation. The stability of a fixed point is found…
It is well-known that population structure is a catalyst for the evolution of cooperation since individuals can reciprocate with their neighbors through local interactions defined by network structures. Previous research typically relies on…
The persistence of biodiversity of species is a challenging proposition in ecological communities in the face of Darwinian selection. The present article investigates beyond the pairwise competitive interactions and provides a novel…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a biological population affects which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations is difficult. Precise results have been…
Ecological systems comprise an astonishing diversity of species that cooperate or compete with each other forming complex mutual dependencies. The minimum requirements to maintain a large species diversity on long time scales are in general…
We investigate the thermodynamics as well as the population dynamics of ecosystems based on a stochastic approach in which the number of individuals of the several species of the ecosystem are treated as stochastic variables. The several…
Scaling laws in ecology, intended both as functional relationships among ecologically-relevant quantities and the probability distributions that characterize their occurrence, have long attracted the interest of empiricists and…
We compute the typical number of equilibria of the Generalized Lotka-Volterra equations describing species-rich ecosystems with random, non-reciprocal interactions using the replicated Kac-Rice method. We characterize the…
Urban ecosystems exhibit complex predator-prey dynamics increasingly disrupted by anthropogenic disturbances (e.g., noise, habitat fragmentation). Classical Lotka-Volterra (LV) models fail to capture these human-induced stressors, and…
Predators often consume multiple prey and by mutually subsidizing a shared predator, the prey may reciprocally harm each other. When predation levels are high, this apparent competition can culminate in a prey species being displaced.…
We study a variant of the cyclic Lotka-Volterra model with three-agent interactions. Inspired by a multiplayer variation of the Rock-Paper-Scissors game, the model describes an ideal ecosystem in which cyclic competition among three species…
Over the last few decades, ecologists have come to appreciate that key ecological patterns, which describe ecological communities at relatively large spatial scales, are not only scale dependent, but also intimately intertwined. The…
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…
We analyze the nonlinear relaxation of a complex ecosystem composed of many interacting species. The ecological system is described by generalized Lotka-Volterra equations with a multiplicative noise. The transient dynamics is studied in…
Understanding the conditions of feasibility and stability in ecological systems is a major challenge in theoretical ecology. The seminal work of May in 1972 and recent developments based on the theory of random matrices have shown the…
The maintenance of diversity, the `commonness of rarity', and compositional turnover are ubiquitous features of species-rich communities. Through a minimal model, we consider how these features reflect the interplay between environmental…
Many natural ecosystems harbor large numbers of coexisting species competing for far fewer distinct resources, in apparent defiance of the competitive exclusion principle. Various mechanisms have been proposed to explain this apparent…