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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…
Many socio-economic and biological processes can be modeled as systems of interacting individuals. The behaviour of such systems can be often described within game-theoretic models. In these lecture notes, we introduce fundamental concepts…
Ecologists are interested in modeling the population growth of species in various ecosystems. Studying population dynamics can assist environmental managers in making better decisions for the environment. Traditionally, the sampling of…
Conservation science depends on an accurate understanding of what's happening in a given ecosystem. How many species live there? What is the makeup of the population? How is that changing over time? Species Distribution Modeling (SDM) seeks…
The abundance of a species' population in an ecosystem is rarely stationary, often exhibiting large fluctuations over time. Using historical data on marine species, we show that the year-to-year fluctuations of population growth rate obey a…
Traditionally, frequency dependent evolutionary dynamics is described by deterministic replicator dynamics assuming implicitly infinite population sizes. Only recently have stochastic processes been introduced to study evolutionary dynamics…
Macroevolution is considered as a problem of stochastic dynamics in a system with many competing agents. Evolutionary events (speciations and extinctions) are triggered by fitness records found by random exploration of the agents' fitness…
Spatial metapopulation models are fundamental to theoretical ecology, enabling to study how landscape structure influences global species dynamics. Traditional models, including recent generalizations, often rely on the deterministic limit…
Environmental stochasticity is known to be a destabilizing factor, increasing abundance fluctuations and extinction rates of populations. However, the stability of a community may benefit from the differential response of species to…
Mathematical modelling of the evolution of the size-spectrum dynamics in aquatic ecosystems was discovered to be a powerful tool to have a deeper insight into impacts of human- and environmental driven changes on the marine ecosystem. In…
The competitive exclusion principle asserts that coexisting species must occupy distinct ecological niches (i.e. the number of surviving species can not exceed the number of resources). An open question is to understand if and how different…
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…
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…
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…
Several theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explain observed biodiversity patterns, ranging from the classical niche-based theories, mainly employing a continuous formalism, to neutral theories, based on statistical mechanics of…
We discuss the relevance of studying ecology within the framework of Complexity Science from a statistical mechanics approach. Ecology is concerned with understanding how systems level properties emerge out of the multitude of interactions…
The central goal of a dynamical theory of evolution is to abstract the mean evolutionary trajectory in the trait space by considering ecological processes at the level of the individual. In this work, we develop such a theory for a new…
This paper investigates the dynamics of biomass in a marine ecosystem. A stochastic process is defined in which organisms undergo jumps in body size as they catch and eat smaller organisms. Using a systematic expansion of the master…
The statistical properties of an ecosystem composed of species interacting via pairwise, random interactions and deterministic, concentration limiting self-interaction are studied analytically with tools of equilibrium statistical mechanics…
Finite-size fluctuations arising in the dynamics of competing populations may have dramatic influence on their fate. As an example, in this article, we investigate a model of three species which dominate each other in a cyclic manner.…