Related papers: Invariance in ecological pattern
An ubiquitous property of biological sensory systems is adaptation: a step increase in stimulus triggers an initial change in a biochemical or physiological response, followed by a more gradual relaxation toward a basal, pre-stimulus level.…
The stability of ecological systems is a fundamental concept in ecology, which offers profound insights into species coexistence, biodiversity, and community persistence. In this article, we provide a systematic and comprehensive review on…
The well-defined but intricate course of time evolution exhibited by many naturally occurring phenomena suggests some source of dynamic order sustaining it. In spite of its obviousness as a problem, it has remained absent from the…
Random matrix theory successfully connects the structure of interactions of large ecological communities to their ability to respond to perturbations. One of the most debated aspects of this approach is the missing role of population…
The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…
Diversity is a fundamental feature of ecosystems, even when the concept of ecosystem is extended to sociology or economics. Diversity can be intended as the count of different items, animals, or, more generally, interactions. There are two…
We propose a minimal model of the dynamics of diversity -- replicator equations with extinction, invasion and mutation. We numerically study the behavior of this simple model and show that it displays completely different behavior from the…
Component systems - ensembles of realizations built from a shared repertoire of modular parts - are ubiquitous in biological, ecological, technological, and socio-cultural domains. From genomes to texts, cities, and software, these systems…
Scale invariance profoundly influences the dynamics and structure of complex systems, spanning from critical phenomena to network architecture. Here, we propose a precise definition of scale-invariant networks by leveraging the concept of a…
An analytic theory of species abundance patterns (SAPs) in biological networks is presented. The theory is based on multispecies replicator dynamics equivalent to the Lotka-Volterra equation, with diverse interspecies interactions. Various…
Environmental stochasticity is known to be a destabilizing factor, increasing abundance fluctuations and extinction rates of populations. However, the stability of a community may benefit from the differential response of species to…
There may be structural principles pertaining to the general behavior of systems that lead to similarities in a variety of different contexts. Classic examples include the descriptive power of fractals, the importance of surface area to…
Mechanisms of pattern formation---of which the Turing instability is an archetype---constitute an important class of dynamical processes occurring in biological, ecological and chemical systems. Recently, it has been shown that the Turing…
There has been a long-standing and at times fractious debate whether complex and large systems can be stable. In ecology, the so-called `diversity-stability debate' arose because mathematical analyses of ecosystem stability were either…
The standard argument for the Lorentz invariance of the thermodynamic entropy in equilibrium is based on the assumption that it is possible to perform an adiabatic transformation whose only outcome is to accelerate a macroscopic body,…
The relationship between sequences and secondary structures or shapes in RNA exhibits robust statistical properties summarized by three notions: (1) the notion of a typical shape (that among all sequences of fixed length certain shapes are…
Complementarity among species with different traits is one of the basic processes affecting biodiversity, defined as the number of species in the ecosystem. We present here a soluble model ecosystem in which the species are characterized by…
Understanding how the structure of community interactions is modified by coevolution is vital for understanding system responses to change at all scales. However, in absence of a group selection process, collective community behaviours…
Microbial communities are ubiquitous in nature and come in a multitude of forms, ranging from communities dominated by a handful of species to communities containing a wide variety of metabolically distinct organisms. This huge range in…
Spatial patterns arising spontaneously due to internal processes are ubiquitous in nature, varying from regular patterns of dryland vegetation to complex structures of bacterial colonies. Many of these patterns can be explained in the…