Related papers: When do we have the power to detect biological int…

Mutualistic interactions are widespread in nature, from plant communities and microbiomes to human organizations. Along with competition for resources, cooperative interactions shape biodiversity and contribute to the robustness of complex…

An active area of research interest is the inference of ecological models of complex microbial communities. Inferring such ecological models entails understanding the interactions between microbes and how they affect each other's growth.…

A challenge in global change biology is to predict how species will respond to future environmental change and to manage these responses. To make such predictions and management actions robust to novel futures, we need to accurately…

Ecologists have long suspected that species are more likely to interact if their traits match in a particular way. For example, a pollination interaction may be more likely if the proportions of a bee's tongue fit a plant's flower shape.…

Enhancement of the predictive power and robustness of nonlinear population dynamics models allows ecologists to make more reliable forecasts about species' long term survival. However, the limited availability of detailed ecological data,…

Many of the observed species interactions embedded in ecological communities are not permanent, but are characterized by temporal changes that are observed along with abiotic and biotic variations. While work has been done describing and…

Spatio-temporal interaction is inherent to cases of infectious diseases and occurrences of earthquakes, whereas the spread of other events, such as cancer or crime, is less evident. Statistical significance tests of space-time clustering…

The random Lotka-Volterra model is widely used to describe the dynamical and thermodynamic features of ecological communities. In this work, we consider random symmetric interactions between species and analyze the strongly competitive…

Measuring the statistical dependence between observed signals is a primary tool for scientific discovery. However, biological systems often exhibit complex non-linear interactions that currently cannot be captured without a priori knowledge…

For a binary choice problem, the spatial coordination of decisions in an agent community is investigated both analytically and by means of stochastic computer simulations. The individual decisions are based on different local information…

Scene viewing is used to study attentional selection in complex but still controlled environments. One of the main observations on eye movements during scene viewing is the inhomogeneous distribution of fixation locations: While some parts…

The maintenance of diversity, the `commonness of rarity', and compositional turnover are ubiquitous features of species-rich communities. Through a minimal model, we consider how these features reflect the interplay between environmental…

How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…

Climate changes may affect ecosystems destabilising relationships among species. We investigate the spatial rock-paper-scissors models with a regional unevenness that reduces the selection capacity of organisms of one species. Our results…

The symbiotic branching model describes the dynamics of a spatial two-type population, where locally particles branch at a rate given by the frequency of the other type combined with nearest-neighbour migration. This model generalizes…

We develop a spatially realistic model of mutualistic metacommunities that exploits the joint structure of spatial and interaction networks. This model exhibits a sharp transition between a stable non-null equilibrium state and a global…

Geographic ranges of communities of species evolve in response to environmental, ecological, and evolutionary forces. Understanding the effects of these forces on species' range dynamics is a major goal of spatial ecology. Previous…

Previous work has shown that species interacting in an ecosystem and actors transacting in an economic context may have notable similarities in behavior. However, the specific mechanism that may underlie similarities in nature and human…

People tend to have their social interactions with members of their own community. Such group-structured interactions can have a profound impact on the behaviors that evolve. Group structure affects the way people cooperate, and how they…

We show how highly-diverse ecological communities may display persistent abundance fluctuations, when interacting through resource competition and subjected to migration from a species pool. This turns out to be closely related to the ratio…