Related papers: Invariance in ecological pattern
Scale-free and non-computable characteristics of natural networks are found to result from the least-time dispersal of energy. To consider a network as a thermodynamic system is motivated since ultimately everything that exists can be…
The availability of data from multiple heterogeneous environments has motivated methods that remain reliable under distributional shifts. When the joint distribution of response and predictors varies across environments, the response may…
We demonstrate with a thought experiment that fitness-based population dynamical approaches to evolution are not able to make quantitative, falsifiable predictions about the long-term behavior of evolutionary systems. A key characteristic…
A full accounting of biological robustness remains elusive; both in terms of the mechanisms by which robustness is achieved and the forces that have caused robustness to grow over evolutionary time. Although its importance to topics such as…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…
In theoretical studies, the most commonly used measure of ecological stability is resilience: ecosystems asymptotic rate of return to equilibrium after a pulse-perturbation $-$or shock. A complementary notion of growing popularity is…
Life on earth is distinguished by long-lived correlations in time. The patterns of material organization that characterize living organisms today are contingent on events that occurred billions of years ago. This contingency is a necessary…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
A system is invariant with respect to an input transformation if we can transform any dynamic input by this function and obtain the same output dynamics after adjusting the initial conditions appropriately. Often, the set of all such input…
Niche and neutral theory are two prevailing, yet much debated, ideas in ecology proposed to explain the patterns of biodiversity. Whereas niche theory emphasizes selective differences between species and interspecific interactions in…
Robustness of biochemical systems has become one of the central questions in systems biology although it is notoriously difficult to formally capture its multifaceted nature. Maintenance of normal system function depends not only on the…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
The irreversibility in a statistical system is traced to its probabilistic evolution, and the molecular chaos assumption is not its unique consequence as is commonly believed. Under the assumption that the rate of change of the each…
Vegetation in semi-arid environments self-organizes into striking spatial patterns -- bands, spots, labyrinths, and gaps -- with characteristic wavelengths on the order of tens to hundreds of meters. Existing reaction-diffusion models…
Models in evolutionary game theory traditionally assume symmetric interactions in homogeneous environments. Here, we consider populations evolving in a heterogeneous environment, which consists of patches of different qualities that are…
The climate system is a forced, dissipative, nonlinear, complex and heterogeneous system that is out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The system exhibits natural variability on many scales of motion, in time as well as space, and it is subject…
Is there an overriding principle of nature, hitherto overlooked, that governs all population behavior? A single principle that drives all the regimes observed in nature - exponential-like growth, saturated growth, population decline,…
Stability is a desirable property of complex ecosystems. If a community of interacting species is at a stable equilibrium point then it is able to withstand small perturbations to component species' abundances without suffering adverse…
All physical process are subject to some laws which determine with math accurately its time-space evolution. These laws are described, in the last analysis for the principle of causality. The physical space can be homogeneous or…
Based on the principle of relativity, we find that the sufficient and necessary condition for the general covariance of a field theory actually requires more than the invariance of its local Langrangian density. If the spacetime is not a…