Related papers: Niche theory for mutualism: A graphical approach t…
Despite the common misconception of nearly static organisms, plants do interact continuously with the environment and with each other. It is fair to assume that during their evolution they developed particular features to overcome problems…
We consider a sharing economy network where agents embedded in a graph share their resources. This is a fundamental model that abstracts numerous emerging applications of collaborative consumption systems. The agents generate a random…
Ecological networks allow us to study the structure and function of ecosystems and gain insights on species resilience/stability. The study of this ecological networks is usually a snapshop focused in a limited specific range of space and…
Network science has become a powerful tool to describe the structure and dynamics of real-world complex physical, biological, social, and technological systems. Largely built on empirical observations to tackle heterogeneous, temporal, and…
Mutualistic interactions, where species interact to obtain mutual benefits, constitute an essential component of natural ecosystems. The use of ecological networks to represent the species and their ecological interactions allows the study…
In mutualisms where there is exchange of resources for resources, or resources for services, the resources are typically short lived compared with the lives of the organisms that produce and make use of them. This fact allows a separation…
Resource competition is a fundamental interaction in natural communities.However little is known about competition in spatial environments where organisms are able to regulate resource distributions. Here, we analyze the competition of two…
The paradox of the plankton highlights the apparent contradiction between Gause's law of competitive exclusion and the observed diversity of phytoplankton. It is well known that phytoplankton dynamics depend heavily on two main resources:…
The need to harmonise apparently irreconcilable arrangements in an ecosystem --nestedness and segregation-- has triggered so far different strategies. Methodological refinements, or the inclusion of behavioural preferences to the network…
Ecosystems are among the most interesting and well-studied examples of self-organized complex systems. Community ecology, the study of how species interact with each other and the environment, has a rich tradition. Over the last few years,…
Understanding the origins of complexity is a fundamental challenge with implications for biological and technological systems. Network theory emerges as a powerful tool to model complex systems. Networks are an intuitive framework to…
Mutually beneficial interactions between plant and pollinators play an essential role in the biodiversity, stability of the ecosystem and crop production. Despite their immense importance, rapid decline events of pollinators are common…
Empirical studies of graphs have contributed enormously to our understanding of complex systems. Known today as network science, what was originally a theoretical study of graphs has grown into a more scientific exploration of communities…
Nestedness is a common property of communication, finance, trade, and ecological networks. In networks with high levels of nestedness, the link positions of low-degree nodes (those with few links) form nested subsets of the link positions…
It has been observed that mutualistic bipartite networks have a nested structure of interactions. In addition, the degree distributions associated with the two guilds involved in such networks (e.g. plants & pollinators or plants & seed…
In complex ecological communities, species may self-organize into clusters or clumps where highly similar species can coexist. The emergence of such species clusters can be captured by the interplay between neutral and niche theories. Based…
Microbial populations exhibit a broad spectrum of nutrient utilization strategies, ranging from strategies utilizing diverse nutrients, called "generalists," to those being highly adapted to specific nutrients, called "specialists." The…
Food webs represent the set of consumer-resource interactions among a set of species that co-occur in a habitat, but most food web studies have omitted parasites and their interactions. Recent studies have provided conflicting evidence on…
Mutualistic networks have attracted increasing attention in the ecological literature in the last decades as they play a key role in the maintenance of biodiversity. Here, we develop an analytical framework to study the structural stability…
In plant-pollinator communities many pollinators are potential generalists and their preferences for certain plants can change quickly in response to changes in plant and pollinator densities. These changes in preferences affect coexistence…