Related papers: The Minimum Environmental Perturbation Principle: …
Structure, composition and stability of ecological populations are shaped by the inter- and intra-species interactions within these communities. It remains to be fully understood how the interplay of these interactions with other factors,…
Neutral dynamics, where taxa are assumed to be demographically equivalent and their abundance is governed solely by the stochasticity of the underlying birth-death process, has proved itself as an important minimal model that accounts for…
Organisms shape their own environment, which in turn affects their survival. This feedback becomes especially important for communities containing a large number of species; however, few existing approaches allow studying this regime,…
Simplified mechanistic models in ecology have been criticized for the fact that a good fit to data does not imply the mechanism is true: pattern does not equal process. In parallel, the maximum entropy principle (MaxEnt) has been applied in…
Ecosystems dynamics is often considered as driven by a coupling of species' resource consumption and its population size dynamics. Such resource-population dynamics is captured by MacArthur-type models. One biologically relevant feature…
Niching enables a genetic algorithm (GA) to maintain diversity in a population. It is particularly useful when the problem has multiple optima where the aim is to find all or as many as possible of these optima. When the fitness landscape…
Modern ecology has re-emphasized the need for a quantitative understanding of the original 'survival of the fittest theme' based on analyzis of the intricate trade-offs between competing evolutionary strategies that characterize the…
The effect of disturbance on a model ecosystem of sessile and mutually competitive species [Mathiesen et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 188101 (2011); Mitarai et al. Phys. Rev. E 86, 011929 (2012) ] is studied. The disturbance stochastically…
Hubbell's neutral theory of biodiversity has successfully explained the observed composition of many ecological communities but it relies on strict demographic equivalence among species and provides no room for evolutionary processes like…
How large ecosystems can create and maintain the remarkable biodiversity we see in nature is probably one of the biggest open questions in science, attracting attention from different fields, from Theoretical Ecology to Mathematics and…
How ecosystems respond to environmental perturbations is a fundamental question in ecology, made especially challenging due to the strong coupling between species and their environment. Here, we introduce a theoretical framework for…
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…
In complex ecological communities, species may self-organize into clusters or clumps where highly similar species can coexist. The emergence of such species clusters can be captured by the interplay between neutral and niche theories. Based…
Preserving biodiversity and ecosystem stability is a challenge that can be pursued through modern statistical mechanics modeling. Here we introduce a variational maximum entropy-based algorithm to evaluate the entropy in a minimal ecosystem…
How systems transit between different stable states under external perturbation is an important practical issue. We discuss here how a recently-developed energy optimization method for identifying the minimal disturbance necessary to reach…
The May--Leonard model was introduced to examine the behavior of three competing populations where rich dynamics, such as limit cycles and nonperiodic cyclic solutions, arise. In this work, we perturb the system by adding the capability of…
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
Understanding under what conditions interacting populations, whether they be plants, animals, or viral particles, coexist is a question of theoretical and practical importance in population biology. Both biotic interactions and…
A general principle is advanced allowing the classification of nonunique solutions to nonlinear evolution equations, corresponding to different spatio-temporal patterns. This is done by defining the probability distribution of patterns,…
Theoretical ecology has traditionally equated persistence with the stability of a fixed equilibrium point. Here we argue that the primary threat to ecosystem persistence need not be the loss of stability, but instead the escape of the…