Related papers: Speciation in a MacArthur model predicts growth, s…
We demonstrate with a thought experiment that fitness-based population dynamical approaches to evolution are not able to make quantitative, falsifiable predictions about the long-term behavior of evolutionary systems. A key characteristic…
Population structure can have a significant effect on evolution. For some systems with sufficient symmetry, analytic results can be derived within the mathematical framework of evolutionary graph theory which relate to the outcome of the…
We derive a linear recursion relation for the species abundance distribution in a statistical model of ecology and demonstrate the existence of a scaling solution.
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…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
Stochastic models that incorporate birth, death and immigration (also called birth-death and innovation models) are ubiquitous and applicable to many research topics such as quantifying species sizes in ecological populations, describing…
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…
There have been many studies to examine whether one trait is correlated with another trait across a group of present-day species (for example, do species with larger brains tend to have longer gestation times. Since the introduction of the…
Organisms and ecological groups accumulate evidence to make decisions. Classic experiments and theoretical studies have explored this process when the correct choice is fixed during each trial. However, we live in a constantly changing…
Joint species distribution models are popular in ecology for modeling covariate effects on species occurrence, while characterizing cross-species dependence. Data consist of multivariate binary indicators of the occurrences of different…
Many species of plants are found in regions to which they are alien and their global distribution has been found to exhibit several remarkable patterns,characterised by exponential functions of the kind that could arise through versions of…
Laboratory experiments with bacterial colonies, under well-controlled conditions often lead to evolutionary diversification, where at least two ecotypes emerge from an initially monomorphic population. Empirical evidence suggests that such…
Fifty years ago, Robert MacArthur showed that stable equilibria optimize quadratic functions of the population sizes in several important ecological models. Here, we generalize this finding to a broader class of systems within the framework…
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…
This article shows how to specify and construct a discrete, stochastic, continuous-time model specifically for ecological systems. The model is more broad than typical chemical kinetics models in two ways. First, using time-dependent hazard…
Mutations in a microbial population can increase the frequency of a genotype not only by increasing its exponential growth rate, but also by decreasing its lag time or adjusting the yield (resource efficiency). The contribution of multiple…
A new delay equation is introduced to describe the punctuated evolution of complex nonlinear systems. A detailed analytical and numerical investigation provides the classification of all possible types of solutions for the dynamics of a…
In a complex system, the individual components are neither so tightly coupled or correlated that they can all be treated as a single unit, nor so uncorrelated that they can be approximated as independent entities. Instead, patterns of…
Infinitely many distinct trait values may arise in populations bearing quantitative traits, and modeling their population dynamics is thus a formidable task. While classical models assume fixed or infinite population size, models in which…
Patterns of biodiversity predicted by the neutral theory rely on a simple phenomenological model of speciation. To further investigate the effect of speciation on neutral biodiversity, we analyze a spatially-explicit neutral model based on…