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We analyze the properties of model food webs and of fifteen community food webs from a variety of environments. We first perform a theoretical analysis of the niche model of Williams and Martinez. We derive analytical expressions for the…
Body size drives the energetic demands of organisms, constraining trophic interactions between species and playing a significant role in shaping the feasibility of species' populations in a community. On macroevolutionary timescales, these…
An agent-based model of population dynamics is presented. The model has as its expected behaviour the population dynamics of the equation-based Webworld model, within which large communities of species can be grown on evolutionary time…
Food webs -- networks of predators and prey -- have long been known to exhibit "intervality": species can generally be ordered along a single axis in such a way that the prey of any given predator tend to lie on unbroken compact intervals.…
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…
Food webs have been found to exhibit remarkable motif profiles, patterns in the relative prevalences of all possible three-species sub-graphs, and this has been related to ecosystem properties such as stability and robustness. Analysing 46…
In models for the evolution of predation from initially purely competitive species interactions, the propensity of predation is most often assumed to be a direct consequence of the relative morphological and physiological traits of…
It is a challenge to predict the response of a large, complex system to a perturbation. Recent attempts to predict the behaviour of food webs have revealed that the effort needed to understand a system grows quickly with its complexity,…
BACKGROUND: An important question is whether evolution favors properties such as mutational robustness or evolvability that do not directly benefit any individual, but can influence the course of future evolution. Functionally similar…
Mathematical modelling of the evolution of the size-spectrum dynamics in aquatic ecosystems was discovered to be a powerful tool to have a deeper insight into impacts of human- and environmental driven changes on the marine ecosystem. In…
The tempo and mode of an adaptive process is strongly determined by the structure of the fitness landscape that underlies it. In order to be able to predict evolutionary outcomes (even on the short term), we must know more about the nature…
The structure of ecological networks, in particular food webs, determines their ability to evolve further, i.e. evolvability. The knowledge about how food web evolvability is determined by the structures of diverse ecological networks can…
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…
An important feature of many complex systems, both natural and artificial, is the structure and organization of their interaction networks with interesting properties. Here we present a theory of self-organization by evolutionary adaptation…
The idea that there are any large-scale trends in the evolution of biological organisms is highly controversial. It is commonly believed, for example, that there is a large-scale trend in evolution towards increasing complexity, but…
We introduce an evolutionary metacommunity of multitrophic food webs on several habitats coupled by migration. In contrast to previous studies that focus either on evolutionary or on spatial aspects, we include both and investigate the…
Ecological systems are emergent features of ecological and adaptive dynamics of a community of interacting species. By natural selection through the abiotic environment and by co-adaptation within the community, species evolve, thereby…
We have generalized our ``unified'' model of evolutionary ecology by taking into account the possible movements of the organisms from one ``patch'' to another within the same eco-system. We model the spatial extension of the eco-system…
Consider a mathematical model of evolutionary adaptation of fitness landscape and mutation matrix as a reaction to population changes. As a basis, we use an open quasispecies model, which is modified to include explicit death flow. We…
Food webs, networks of feeding relationships among organisms, provide fundamental insights into mechanisms that determine ecosystem stability and persistence. Despite long-standing interest in the compartmental structure of food webs, past…