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It is well-known that interactions between species determine the population composition in an ecosystem. Conventional studies have focused on fixed population structures to reveal how interactions shape population compositions. However,…
Close to the critical point associated with nascent of bistability and large wavelength pattern forming regime, {\it the Lifshitz point}, the dynamics of many ecological spatially extended systems can be reduced to a simple partial…
Predicting species persistence within ecological communities is a fundamental challenge for both empirical and theoretical ecology. Existing methods span from mechanistic models, whose parameters are difficult to estimate from data, to…
Human flourishing is often severely limited by persistent violence. Quantitative conflict research has found common temporal and other statistical patterns in warfare, but very little is understood about its general spatial patterns. While…
Self-arrangement of individuals into spatial patterns often accompanies and promotes species diversity in ecological systems. Here, we investigate pattern formation arising from cyclic dominance of three species, operating near a…
This research investigates the impact of dynamic, time-varying interactions on cooperative behaviour in social dilemmas. Traditional research has focused on deterministic rules governing pairwise interactions, yet the impact of interaction…
Self-organized spatial patterns of vegetation are frequent in drylands and, because pattern shape correlates with water availability, they have been suggested as important indicators of ecosystem health. However, the mechanisms underlying…
To construct models of large, multivariate complex systems, such as those in biology, one needs to constrain which variables are allowed to interact. This can be viewed as detecting "local" structures among the variables. In the context of…
Ecological selection is a major driver of community assembly. Selection is classified as stabilizing when species with intermediate trait values gain the highest reproductive success, whereas selection is considered directional when fitness…
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…
The objective of this paper is to give a rigorous analysis of a stochastic spatial model of producer-consumer systems that has been recently introduced by Kang and the author to understand the role of space in ecological communities in…
Individual species may experience diverse outcomes, from prosperity to extinction, in an ecological community subject to external and internal variations. Despite the wealth of theoretical results derived from random matrix ensembles, a…
The evolution of dispersal rate is studied with a model of several local populations linked by dispersal. Three dispersal strategies are considered where all, half, or none of the offspring disperse. The spatial scale (number of patches)…
In any ecosystem, the conditions of the environment and the characteristics of the species that inhabit it are entangled, co-evolving in space and time. We introduce a model that couples active agents with a dynamic environment, interpreted…
There are many scales at which to quantify stability in spatial and ecological networks. Local-scale analyses focus on specific nodes of the spatial network, while regional-scale analyses consider the whole network. Similarly, species- and…
In this paper we consider a microscopic model of a simple ecosystem. The basic ingredients of this model are individuals, and both the phenotypic and genotypic levels are taken in account. The model is based on a long range cellular…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
We explore how physical scale and population size shape the emergence of complex behaviors in open-ended ecological environments. In our setting, agents are unsupervised and have no explicit rewards or learning objectives but instead evolve…
Presence-only data, point locations where a species has been recorded as being present, are often used in modeling the distribution of a species as a function of a set of explanatory variables---whether to map species occurrence, to…
Models of coordinated behavior of populations living in the same environment are introduced for the cases when they either compete with each other, or they both gain by mutual interactions, or finally when one hunts the other one. The…