Related papers: Waves of desertification in a competitive ecosyste…

Understanding the combined effects of climate change and habitat fragmentation on the adaptive potential of plant populations is essential for devising effective conservation strategies. This is particularly important where mating system…

We present a model for evolution and extinction in large ecosystems. The model incorporates the effects of interactions between species and the influences of abiotic environmental factors. We study the properties of the model by approximate…

Ecological systems show a variety of characteristic patterns of biodiversity in space and time. It is a challenge for theory to find models that can reproduce and explain the observed patterns. Since the advent of island biogeography these…

The sustainable management of common resources often leads to a social dilemma known as the tragedy of the commons: individuals benefit from rapid extraction of resources, while communities as a whole benefit from more sustainable…

How do landscape fragmentation affects ecosystems diversity and stability is an important and complex question in ecology with no simple answer, as spatially separated habitats where species live are highly dynamic rather than just static.…

This work investigates how biodiversity is affected in a cyclic spatial May-Leonard model with hierarchical and non-hierarchical rules. Here we propose a generalization of the traditional rock-paper-scissors model by considering highly…

Relations among species in ecosystems can be represented by complex networks where both negative (competition) and positive (mutualism) interactions are concurrently present. Recently, it has been shown that many ecosystems can be cast into…

We study a simple model of a forager as a walk that modifies a relaxing substrate. Within it simplicity, this provides an insight on a number of relevant and non-intuitive facts. Even without memory of the good places to feed and no…

The process of desertification is usually modeled as a first order transition, where a change of an external parameter (e.g. precipitation) leads to a catastrophic bifurcation followed by an ecological regime shift. However, vegetation…

For years, a main focus of ecological research has been to better understand the complex dynamical interactions between species which comprise food webs. Using the connectance properties of a widely explored synthetic food web called the…

We present numerical results based on a simplified ecological system in evolution, showing features of extinction similar to that claimed for the biosystem on Earth. In the model each species consists of a population in interaction with the…

One of the central questions of metacommunity theory is how dispersal of organisms affects species diversity. Here we show that the diversity-dispersal relationship should not be studied in isolation of other abiotic and biotic flows in the…

The significant role of space in maintaining species coexistence and determining community structure and function is well established. However, community ecology studies have mainly focused on simple competition and predation systems, and…

This study investigates the impacts of grazing duration and intensity on vegetation population dynamics in semi-arid ecosystems characterized by seasonal succession. A novel piecewise periodic model is proposed, dividing the annual cycle…

In the Monte desert, increasing population density, changing land rights and infrastructure may encourage livestock activity, with unknown consequences on ecosystems. Factors that influence livestock settlement distribution may affect…

Ecosystems are formed by networks of species and their interactions. Traditional models of such interactions assume a constant interaction strength between a given pair of species. However, there is often significant trait variation among…

We investigate species-rich mathematical models of ecosystems. While much of the existing literature focuses on the properties of equilibrium fixed points, persistent dynamics (e.g., limit cycles or chaos) have also been observed, both in…

Decisions to disperse from a habitat stand out among organismal behaviors as pivotal drivers of ecosystem dynamics across scales. Encounters with other species are an important component of adaptive decision-making in dispersal, resulting…

Over the last few decades, ecologists have come to appreciate that key ecological patterns, which describe ecological communities at relatively large spatial scales, are not only scale dependent, but also intimately intertwined. The…

Predators often consume multiple prey and by mutually subsidizing a shared predator, the prey may reciprocally harm each other. When predation levels are high, this apparent competition can culminate in a prey species being displaced.…