Related papers: Diverse communities behave like typical random eco…

Online communities are important organizational forms where members socialize and share information. Curiously, different online communities often overlap considerably in topic and membership. Recent research has investigated competition…

Biodiversity widely observed in ecological systems is attributed to the dynamical balance among the competing species. The time-varying populations of the interacting species are often captured rather well by a set of deterministic…

Random utility theory models an agent's preferences on alternatives by drawing a real-valued score on each alternative (typically independently) from a parameterized distribution, and then ranking the alternatives according to scores. A…

The species-area relationship is one of the central generalizations in ecology however its origin has remained a puzzle. Since ecosystems are understood as energy transduction systems, the regularities in species richness are considered to…

Until recently, much of the microbial world was hidden from view. A global research effort has changed this, unveiling and quantifying microbial diversity across enormous range of critically-important contexts, from the human microbiome, to…

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…

Entropy measures of probability distributions are widely used measures in ecology, biology, genetics, and in other fields, to quantify species diversity of a community. Unfortunately, entropy-based diversity indices, or diversity indices…

Both human-made and natural supply systems, such as power grids and leaf venation networks, are built to operate reliably under changing external conditions. Many of these spatial networks exhibit community structures. Here, we show that a…

We wish to formally test for changes in the taxonomic diversity of a community, especially in the presence of high latent diversity. Drawing on the meta-analysis literature, we construct a model for diversity that accounts for covariate…

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…

Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…

During the last decades macroecology has identified broad-scale patterns of abundances and diversity of microbial communities and put forward some potential explanations for them. However, these advances are not paralleled by a full…

Many natural patterns, such as the distributions of blood particles in a blood sample, proteins on cell surfaces, biological populations in their habitat, galaxies in the universe, the sequence of human genes, and the fitness in…

Populations of species in ecosystems are often constrained by availability of resources within their environment. In effect this means that a growth of one population, needs to be balanced by comparable reduction in populations of others.…

A challenging problem in the study of complex systems is that of resolving, without prior information, the emergent, mesoscopic organization determined by groups of units whose dynamical activity is more strongly correlated internally than…

There is mounting empirical evidence that many communities of living organisms display key features which closely resemble those of physical systems at criticality. We here introduce a minimal model framework for the dynamics of a community…

Mutualistic communities have an internal structure that makes them resilient to external per- turbations. Late research has focused on their stability and the topology of the relations between the different organisms to explain the reasons…

Mutualistic networks are formed when the interactions between two classes of species are mutually beneficial. They are important examples of cooperation shaped by evolution. Mutualism between animals and plants plays a key role in the…

A novel mathematical framework is proposed to describe the ecological and evolutionary consequences of consumer--resource interactions. Both the consumer and resource are assumed to consist of several (sub)species, which interact between…

Complex ecosystems generally consist of a large number of different species utilizing a large number of different resources. Several of their features cannot be captured by models comprising just a few species and resources. Recently,…