Related papers: Diversity, stability, and reproducibility in stoch…
Microbial communities are ubiquitous in nature and come in a multitude of forms, ranging from communities dominated by a handful of species to communities containing a wide variety of metabolically distinct organisms. This huge range in…
This is the second of two papers dedicated to the relationship between population models of competition and biodiversity. Here we consider species assembly models where the population dynamics is kept far from fixed points through the…
Microbial populations in the natural environment are likely to experience growth conditions very different from those of a typical laboratory xperiment. In particular, removal rates of biomass and substrate are unlikely to be balanced under…
We investigate the formation of stable ecological networks where many species share the same resource. We show that such stable ecosystem naturally occurs as a result of extinctions. We obtain an analytical relation for the number of…
Microbial populations generally evolve in volatile environments, under conditions fluctuating between harsh and mild, e.g. as the result of sudden changes in toxin concentration or nutrient abundance. Environmental variability thus shapes…
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…
The increasing volume of ecologically and biologically relevant data has revealed a wide collection of emergent patterns in living systems. Analyzing different datasets, ranging from metabolic gene-regulatory to species interaction…
Complementarity among species with different traits is one of the basic processes affecting biodiversity, defined as the number of species in the ecosystem. We present here a soluble model ecosystem in which the species are characterized by…
By creating networks of biochemical pathways, communities of micro-organisms are able to modulate the properties of their environment and even the metabolic processes within their hosts. Next-generation high-throughput sequencing has led to…
Metagenomics has revealed hundreds of bacterial species in almost all microbiota. In a few well-studied cases, bacterial communities have been observed to coordinate their metabolic fluxes. In principle, bacteria can divide tasks to reap…
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…
A new model ecosystem consisting of many interacting species is introduced. The species are connected through a random matrix with a given connectivity. It is shown that the system is organized close to a boundary of marginal stability in…
This is the first of two papers where we discuss the limits imposed by competition to the biodiversity of species communities. In this first paper we study the coexistence of competing species at the fixed point of population dynamic…
Microbial communities feature an immense diversity of species and this diversity is linked with outcomes ranging from ecosystem stability to medical prognoses. Yet the mechanisms underlying microbial diversity are under debate. While simple…
The growth of complex populations, such as microbial communities, forests, and cities, occurs over vastly different spatial and temporal scales. Although research in different fields has developed detailed, system-specific models to…
Soil microbial communities are known to be robust against perturbations such as nutrition inputs, which appears as an obstacle for the soil improvement. On the other hand, its adaptable aspect has been also reported. Here we propose simple…
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…
Highly-diverse ecosystems exhibit a broad distribution of population sizes and species turnover, where species at high and low abundances are exchanged over time. We show that these two features generically emerge in the fluctuating phase…
Over the past century, nonlinear difference and differential equations have been used to understand conditions for species coexistence. However, these models fail to account for random fluctuations due to demographic and environmental…
Populations of species in ecosystems are often constrained by availability of resources within their environment. In effect this means that a growth of one population, needs to be balanced by comparable reduction in populations of others.…