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Mapping pathways to achieving the sustainable development goals requires understanding and predicting how social, economic and political factors impact biodiversity. Trends in demography, economic growth, regional alliances and consumption…
Dynamic extinction colonisation models (also called contact processes) are widely studied in epidemiology and in metapopulation theory. Contacts are usually assumed to be possible only through a network of connected patches. This network…
Spatial ecological networks are widely used to model interactions between georeferenced biological entities (e.g., populations or communities). The analysis of such data often leads to a two-step approach where groups containing similar…
The complexity of an ecological community can be distilled into a network, where diverse interactions connect species in a web of dependencies. Species interact not only with each other but indirectly through environmental effects, however…
We analyze the joint effect of contaminants and nutrient loading on population dynamics of marine food chains by means of bifurcation analysis. Contaminant toxicity is assumed to alter mortality of some species with a sigmoidal…
UK woodlands, forests, and urban treescapes are under threat from invasive species, exacerbated by climate change, trade, and transport. Invasive tree pests debilitate their host and disrupt forest ecosystems, thus it is imperative to…
Recent years have seen the world become a closely connected society with the emergence of different types of social networks. Online social networks have provided a way to bridge long distances and establish numerous communication channels…
Using a network representation for real soil samples and mathematical models for microbial spread, we show that the structural heterogeneity of the soil habitat may have a very significant influence on the size of microbial invasions of the…
1. Theoretical models pertaining to feedbacks between ecological and evolutionary processes are prevalent in multiple biological fields. An integrative overview is currently lacking, due to little crosstalk between the fields and the use of…
Certain invasive plants may rely on interference mechanisms (allelopathy, e.g.) to gain competitive superiority over native species. But expending resources on interference presumably exacts a cost in another life-history trait, so that the…
This is the second of two papers dedicated to the relationship between population models of competition and biodiversity. Here we consider species assembly models where the population dynamics is kept far from fixed points through the…
The study of interactions between multiple species in an ecosystem is an active and impactful direction of inquiry. This is true in particular for fragile systems in which even small perturbations of their functional parameters can produce…
Terrestrial ecosystems are generally green and only a small part (<10%) of the plant matter is consumed by herbivores annually,but the reason has been unclear due to the lack of food web models for predicting the absolute herbivore biomass…
The structure of ecological interactions is commonly understood through analyses of interaction networks. However, these analyses may be sensitive to sampling biases in both the interactors (the nodes of the network) and interactions (the…
We consider the effect of network structure on the evolution of a population. Models of this kind typically consider a population of fixed size and distribution. Here we consider eco-evolutionary dynamics where population size and…
A common theme among the proposed models for network epidemics is the assumption that the propagating object, i.e., a virus or a piece of information, is transferred across the nodes without going through any modification or evolution.…
We investigate numerically and analytically a recently proposed model for food webs [Nature {\bf 404}, 180 (2000)] in the limit of large web sizes and sparse interaction matrices. We obtain analytical expressions for several quantities with…
Ecologists and conservation biologists need to identify the relative importance of species to make sound management decisions and effectively allocate scarce resources. We introduce a new method, termed environ centrality, to determine the…
Ecosystems are commonly organized into trophic levels -- organisms that occupy the same level in a food chain (e.g., plants, herbivores, carnivores). A fundamental question in theoretical ecology is how the interplay between trophic…
The role of species interactions in controlling the interplay between the stability of an ecosystem and its biodiversity is still not well understood. The ability of ecological communities to recover after a small perturbation of the…