Related papers: Testing host-plant driven speciation in phytophago…
In this paper, we inspect well-known population genetics and social dynamics models. In these models, interacting individuals, while participating in a self-organizing process, give rise to the emergence of complex behaviors and patterns.…
A primary motivation for our research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. Ecosystems are thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex,…
The main topic of this thesis is the analysis of evolution equations reflecting issues in ecology and population dynamics. In mathematical modelling, the impact of environmental elements and the interaction between species is read into the…
The theory of life history evolution provides a powerful framework to understand the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens in both epidemic and endemic situations. This framework, however, relies on the assumption that pathogen populations are…
Whether or not biodiversity dynamics tend toward stable equilibria remains an unsolved question in ecology and evolution with important implications for our understanding of diversity and its conservation. Phylo/population genetic models…
In freshwater ecosystems, aquatic insects that ontogenetically shift their habitat from aquatic to terrestrial play vital roles as prey subsidies that move nutrients and energy from aquatic to terrestrial food webs. As a result, these…
Dispersal is ubiquitous throughout the tree of life: factors selecting for dispersal include kin competition, inbreeding avoidance and spatiotemporal variation in resources or habitat suitability. These factors differ in whether they…
Molecular phylogenetic and phylogeographic reconstructions generally assume time-homogeneous substitution processes. Motivated by computational convenience, this assumption sacrifices biological realism and offers little opportunity to…
Phylogenetic mixtures model the inhomogeneous molecular evolution commonly observed in data. The performance of phylogenetic reconstruction methods where the underlying data is generated by a mixture model has stimulated considerable recent…
Insect-pests significantly impact global agricultural productivity and quality. Effective management involves identifying the full insect community, including beneficial insects and harmful pests, to develop and implement integrated pest…
The coexistence of multiple phytoplankton species despite their reliance on similar resources is often explained with mean-field models assuming mixed populations. In reality, observations of phytoplankton indicate spatial aggregation at…
Coexistence of individuals with different species or phenotypes is often found in nature in spite of competition between them. Stable coexistence of multiple types of individuals have implications for maintenance of ecological biodiversity…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…
One of the properties that make ecological systems so unique is the range of complex behavioural patterns that can be exhibited by even the simplest communities with only a few species. Much of this complexity is commonly attributed to…
Species richness varies widely across the tree of life, and there is great interest in identifying ecological, geographic, and other factors that affect rates of species proliferation. Recent methods for explicitly modeling the…
Segregation of populations is a key question in evolution theory. One important aspect is the relation between spatial organization and the population's composition. Here we study a specific example -- sectors in expanding bacterial…
Phytophagous mites in the genus Brevipalpus (Tenuipalpidae) can be major pests, causing direct damage to their host plants or vectoring viruses. However, a phylogeny-based classification to understand their evolution and predict their…
Species introductions promote secondary contacts between taxa with long histories of allopatric divergence. Anthropogenic contact zones thus offer valuable contrasts to speciation studies in natural systems where past spatial isolations may…
We perform simulations based on the Penna model for biological ageing, now with the purpose of studying sympatric speciation, that is, the division of a single species into two or more populations, reproductively isolated, but without any…
Climate change and the resulting increased drought frequencies pose considerable threats to forest herb populations, especially when compounded by additional environmental challenges. Specifically, habitat fragmentation may disrupt climate…