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Mutualistic interactions, where individuals from different species can benefit from each other, are widespread across ecosystems. This study develops a general deterministic model of mutualism involving two populations, assuming that…
Complex network theory provides a powerful framework to statistically investigate the topology of local and non-local statistical interrelationships, i.e. teleconnections, in the climate system. Climate networks constructed from the same…
Mutualisms are key for structuring ecological communities, but they are sensitive to environmental change and fluctuations in population size. Consequently, how mutualisms achieve stability remains an open question in ecological theory.…
Coexistence of plants depends on their competition for common resources and indirect interactions mediated by shared exploiters or mutualists. These interactions are driven either by changes in animal abundance (density-mediated…
Plant-pollinator mutualistic networks are asymmetric in their interactions: specialist plants are pollinated by generalist animals, while generalist plants are pollinated by a broad involving specialists and generalists. It has been…
In this paper, we present a survey of the use of graph theoretical techniques in Biology. In particular, we discuss recent work on identifying and modelling the structure of bio-molecular networks, as well as the application of centrality…
Patterns of nestedness and specialization asymmetry, where specialist species interact mainly with generalists while generalists interact with both generalists and specialists, are often observed in mutualistic and antagonistic bi-partite…
Mutualistic networks have been shown to involve complex patterns of interactions among animal and plant species. The architecture of these webs seems to pervade some of their robust and fragile behaviour. Recent work indicates that there is…
We investigate how the pattern of contacts between species in mutualistic ecosystems is affected by the phylogenetic proximity between the species of each guild. We develop several theoretical tools to measure that effect and we use them to…
Bipartite networks provide an insightful representation of many systems, ranging from mutualistic networks of species interactions to investment networks in finance. The analysis of their topological structures has revealed the ubiquitous…
Individual species may experience diverse outcomes, from prosperity to extinction, in an ecological community subject to external and internal variations. Despite the wealth of theoretical results derived from random matrix ensembles, a…
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…
We study a stochastic individual-based model of interacting plant and pollinator species through a bipartite graph: each species is a node of the graph, an edge representing interactions between a pair of species. The dynamics of the system…
The origin of diversification and coexistence of genes and species have been traditionally studied in isolated biological levels. Ecological and evolutionary views have focused on the mechanisms that enable or constrain species coexistence,…
We use the optimal foraging theory to study coexistence between two plant species and a generalist pollinator. We compare conditions for plant coexistence for non-adaptive vs. adaptive pollinators that adjust their foraging strategy to…
One of the central questions of metacommunity theory is how dispersal of organisms affects species diversity. Here we show that the diversity-dispersal relationship should not be studied in isolation of other abiotic and biotic flows in the…
Nestedness is a property of bipartite complex networks that has been shown to characterize the peculiar structure of biological and economical networks. In a nested network, a node of low degree has its neighborhood included in the…
This paper presents a novel way to approximate a distribution governing a system of coupled particles with a product of independent distributions. The approach is an extension of mean field theory that allows the independent distributions…
A mutualism is an interaction where the involved species benefit from each other. We study a two-dimensional hexagonal three-state cellular automaton model of a two-species mutualistic system. The simple model is characterized by four…
We develop an theoretical approach for predicting biodiversity in multi-dimensional niche spaces, arising due to ecological drivers such as competitive exclusion. The novelty of our approach relies on the fact that ecological niches are…