Related papers: The collapse of ecosystem engineer populations

We study a complementarity game as a systematic tool for the investigation of the interplay between individual optimization and population effects and for the comparison of different strategy and learning schemes. The game randomly pairs…

In evolution theory the concept of a fitness landscape has played an important role, evolution itself being portrayed as a hill-climbing process on a rugged landscape. In this article it is shown that in general, in the presence of other…

We propose a model of multispecies populations surviving on distributed resources. System dynamics are investigated under changes in abiotic factors such as the climate, as parameterized through environmental temperature. In particular, we…

Dormancy is a widespread adaptive strategy that enables populations to persist in fluctuating environments, yet how its benefits depend on the temporal structure of environmental variability remains unclear. We examine how dormancy…

Real-world optimisation problems are often dynamic. Previously good solutions must be updated or replaced due to changes in objectives and constraints. It is often claimed that evolutionary algorithms are particularly suitable for dynamic…

Humans have been able to tackle biosphere complexities by acting as ecosystem engineers, profoundly changing the flows of matter, energy and information. This includes major innovations that allowed to reduce and control the impact of…

The tragedy of the commons has traditionally been framed as a problem of resource overuse driven by self-interested exploitation. In contrast, growing empirical evidence shows that insufficient use or abandonment of natural resources, known…

We explore the connection between migration patterns and emergent behaviors of evolving populations in spatially heterogeneous environments. Despite extensive studies in ecologically and medically important systems, a unifying framework…

We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems, which are considered to be robust, self-organising and scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex, dynamic problems. So, this work is…

Population dynamics on a rugged landscape is studied analytically and numerically within a simple discrete model for evolution of N individuals in one-dimensional fitness space. We reduce the set of master equations to a single Fokker-Plank…

Here we describe how some important scaling laws observed in the distribution of languages on Earth can emerge from a simple computer simulation. The proposed language dynamics includes processes of selective geographic colonization,…

Unlike many physical nonequilibrium systems, in biological systems, the coupling to external energy sources is not a fixed parameter but adaptively controlled by the system itself. We do not have theoretical frameworks that allow for such…

Populations are often subject to catastrophes that cause mass removal of individuals. Many stochastic growth models have been considered to explain such dynamics. Among the results reported, it has been considered whether dispersion…

We describe a continuous-time modelling framework for biological population dynamics that accounts for demographic noise. In the spirit of the methodology used by statistical physicists, transitions between the states of the system are…

It is still common wisdom amongst economists, politicians and lay people that economic growth is a necessity of our social systems, at least to avoid distributional conflicts. This paper challenges such belief moving from a purely physical…

We seek to model the coupled evolution of a planet and a civilization through the era when energy harvesting by the civilization drives the planet into new and adverse climate states. In this way we ask if triggering "anthropocenes" of the…

Evolutionary game theory has traditionally employed deterministic models to describe population dynamics. These models, due to their inherent nonlinearities, can exhibit deterministic chaos, where population fluctuations follow complex,…

The expansion of a population into new habitat is a transient process that leaves its footprints in the genetic composition of the expanding population. How the structure of the environment shapes the population front and the evolutionary…

Comprehensive models of stochastic, clonally reproducing populations are defined in terms of general branching processes, allowing birth during maternal life, as for higher organisms, or by splitting, as in cell division. The populations…

We analyze the long-term stability of a stochastic model designed to illustrate the adaptation of a population to variation in its environment. A piecewise-deterministic process modeling adaptation is coupled to a Feller logistic diffusion…