Related papers: Invariance in ecological pattern
Connectivity patterns of ecological elements are often the core concern of ecologists working at multiple levels of organization (e.g., populations, ecosystems, and landscapes) because these patterns often reflect the forces shaping the…
The interrelationships of the fundamental biological processes natural selection, mutation, and stochastic drift are quantified by the entropy rate of Moran processes with mutation, measuring the long-run variation of a Markov process. The…
Transformation groups, such as translations or rotations, effectively express part of the variability observed in many recognition problems. The group structure enables the construction of invariant signal representations with appealing…
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…
The assembly and persistence of ecological communities can be understood as the result of the interaction and migration of species. Here we study a single community subject to migration from a species pool in which inter-specific…
Simplicity is held by many to be the key to general intelligence. Simpler models tend to "generalise", identifying the cause or generator of data with greater sample efficiency. The implications of the correlation between simplicity and…
Ecology and evolution are inseparable. Motivated by some recent experiments, we have developed models of evolutionary ecology from the perspective of dynamic networks. In these models, in addition to the intra-node dynamics, which…
The abundance of a species' population in an ecosystem is rarely stationary, often exhibiting large fluctuations over time. Using historical data on marine species, we show that the year-to-year fluctuations of population growth rate obey a…
Justification theory is an abstract unifying formalism that captures semantics of various non-monotonic logics. One intriguing problem that has received significant attention is the consistency problem: under which conditions are…
Many biological systems perform close to their physical limits, but promoting this optimality to a general principle seems to require implausibly fine tuning of parameters. Using examples from a wide range of systems, we show that this…
Speciation is the "elephant in the room" of community ecology. As the ultimate source of biodiversity, its integration in ecology's theoretical corpus is necessary to understand community assembly. Yet, speciation is often completely…
An important use of computational systems is updating the state of an object while preserving some set of invariants. That object might be a file, a row in a database, or perhaps an entry in a distributed system. Its invariants may place…
Well known biological approximations are universal, i.e. invariant to transformations from one species to another. With no other experimental data, such invariance yields exact conservation (with respect to biological diversity and…
Feedbacks between evolution and ecology are ubiquitous, with ecological interactions determining which mutants are successful, and these mutants in turn modifying community structure. We study the evolutionary dynamics of several ecological…
Species coexistence is one of the central themes in modern ecology. Coexistence is a prerequisite of biological diversity. However, the question arises how biodiversity can be reconciled with the statement of competition theory, which…
One of the main properties of biological systems is modularity, which manifests itself at all levels of their organization, starting with the level of molecular genetics, ending with the level of whole organisms and their communities. In a…
We consider the problem of quantum behavior in the finite background. Introduction of continuum or other infinities into physics leads only to technical complications without any need for them in description of empirical observations. The…
We perform a full similarity analysis of an idealized ecosystem using Buckingham's $\Pi$ theorem to obtain dimensionless similarity parameters given that some (non- unique) method exists that can differentiate different functional groups of…
The consensus that complexity begets stability in ecosystems was challenged in the seventies, a result recently extended to ecologically-inspired networks. The approaches assume the existence of a feasible equilibrium, i.e. with positive…
The functioning of many biochemical networks is often robust -- remarkably stable under changes in external conditions and internal reaction parameters. Much recent work on robustness and evolvability has focused on the structure of neutral…