Related papers: Ecosystem-level stabilizing effects of biodiversit…
Natural selection imply that any organisms including human being will evolve to improve its fitness advantage and the selected genotype or phenotype in equilibrium state will not vary over the time. However, evolutionary process of…
In this study three soil ecosystems, that differ in the type of management, have been compared in the attempt to understand if and how anthropogenic action affects them. The structure of the corresponding food webs was analyzed and their…
Bacteria and their bacteriophages are the most abundant, widespread and diverse groups of biological entities on the planet. In an attempt to understand how the interactions between bacteria, virulent phages and temperate phages might…
Two species with similar resource requirements respond in a characteristic way to variations in their habitat -- their abundances rise and fall in concert. We use this idea to learn how bacterial populations in the microbiota respond to…
Ecological interactions can dramatically alter evolutionary outcomes in complex communities. Yet, the framework of population genetics largely neglects interactions from a species-rich community. Here, we bridge this gap by using dynamical…
Species' interactions are shaped by their traits. Thus, we expect traits -- in particular, trait (dis)similarity -- to play a central role in determining whether a particular set of species coexists. Traits are, in turn, the outcome of an…
Understanding the mechanisms that govern species coexistence and biodiversity represents a fundamental challenge in ecology. This study extends the classic rock-paper-scissors model by introducing a context-dependent higher-order…
We study a version of the Tangled Nature model of evolutionary ecology redefined in a phenotype space where mutants have properties correlated to their parents. The model has individual-based dynamics whilst incorporating species scale…
A detailed analysis of three species-rich ecosystem food webs has shown that they display scale-free distributions of connections. Such graphs of interaction are in fact shared by a number of biological and technological networks, which…
In microbial communities, each species often has multiple, distinct phenotypes, but studies of ecological stability have largely ignored this subpopulation structure. Here, we show that such implicit averaging over phenotypes leads to…
Most of the world poorest people come from rural areas and depend on their local ecosystems for food production. Recent research has highlighted the importance of self-reinforcing dynamics between low soil quality and persistent poverty but…
Geographic ranges of communities of species evolve in response to environmental, ecological, and evolutionary forces. Understanding the effects of these forces on species' range dynamics is a major goal of spatial ecology. Previous…
Food webs are networks describing who is eating whom in an ecological community. By now it is clear that many aspects of food-web structure are reproducible across diverse habitats, yet little is known about the driving force behind this…
Ecological systems comprise an astonishing diversity of species that cooperate or compete with each other forming complex mutual dependencies. The minimum requirements to maintain a large species diversity on long time scales are in general…
Despite its radical assumption of ecological equivalence between species, neutral biodiversity theory can often provide good fits to species abundance distributions observed in nature. Major criticisms of neutral theory have focused on…
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…
Microbial ecosystems are commonly modeled by fixed interactions between species in steady exponential growth states. However, microbes often modify their environments so strongly that they are forced out of the exponential state into…
This is the first of two papers where we discuss the limits imposed by competition to the biodiversity of species communities. In this first paper we study the coexistence of competing species at the fixed point of population dynamic…
Ecological networks such as plant-pollinator systems and food webs vary in space and time. This variability includes fluctuations in global network properties such as total number and intensity of interactions but also in the local…
Over the last two decades, several methods have been proposed for stabilizing the dynamics of biological populations. However, these methods have typically been evaluated using different population dynamics models and in the context of very…