Related papers: Theoretical guidelines for editing ecological comm…
Ecologists are interested in understanding and predicting how ecological communities change through time. While it might seem natural to measure this through changes in species' abundances, computational limitations mean transitions between…
Species interactions (ranging from direct predator prey relationships to indirect effects mediated by the environment) are central to ecosystem balance and biodiversity. While empirical methods for measuring these interactions exist, their…
In the last years, a remarkable theoretical effort has been made in order to understand stability and complexity in ecological communities. The non-random structures of real ecological interaction networks has been recognized as one key…
Global environmental change is affecting species distribution and their interactions with other species. In particular, the main drivers of environmental change strongly affect the strength of interspecific interactions with considerable…
Ecological models traditionally explain stability and coexistence through pairwise interactions among species. These interactions can also involve groups of three or more species, higher-order interactions, which recent theory suggests can…
Microbiome-based stratification of healthy individuals into compositional categories, referred to as "community types", holds promise for drastically improving personalized medicine. Despite this potential, the existence of community types…
Interactions in natural communities can be highly heterogeneous, with any given species interacting appreciably with only some of the others, a situation commonly represented by sparse interaction networks. We study the consequences of…
The persistence of biodiversity of species is a challenging proposition in ecological communities in the face of Darwinian selection. The present article investigates beyond the pairwise competitive interactions and provides a novel…
Many species of microbes cooperate by producing public goods from which they collectively benefit. However, these populations are under the risk of being taken over by cheating mutants that do not contribute to the pool of public goods.…
The far-reaching consequences of ecological interactions in the dynamics of biological communities remain an intriguing subject. For decades, competition has been a cornerstone in ecological processes, but mounting evidence shows that…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
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…
Epidemic control is of great importance for human society. Adjusting interacting partners is an effective individualized control strategy. Intuitively, it is done either by shortening the interaction time between susceptible and infected…
Understanding the stability of complex communities is a central focus in ecology, many important theoretical advancements have been made to identify drivers of ecological stability. However, previous results often rely on the…
Does an ecological community allow stable coexistence? Identifying the general principles that determine the answer to this question is a central problem of theoretical ecology. Random matrix theory approaches have uncovered the general…
The role of species interactions in controlling the interplay between the stability of an ecosystem and its biodiversity is still not well understood. The ability of ecological communities to recover after a small perturbation of the…
Large language model behavior is shaped by the language of those with whom they interact. This capacity and their increasing prevalence online portend that they will intentionally or unintentionally "program" one another and form emergent…
The foundational concepts behind the persistence of ecological communities have been based on two ecological properties: dynamical stability and feasibility. The former is typically regarded as the capacity of a community to return to an…
Species-rich communities, such as the microbiota or microbial ecosystems, provide key functions for human health and climatic resilience. Increasing effort is being dedicated to design experimental protocols for selecting community-level…
Dynamics of species' abundances in ecological communities are often described using models that only account for a few species. It is not clear when and why this would be possible, as most species form part of diverse ecological…