Related papers: Intraspecific competition in models for vegetation…
Relations among species in ecosystems can be represented by complex networks where both negative (competition) and positive (mutualism) interactions are concurrently present. Recently, it has been shown that many ecosystems can be cast into…
Dryland ecosystems commonly exhibit periodic bands of vegetation, thought to form due to competition between individual plants for heterogeneously distributed water. In this paper, we develop a Fourier method for locally identifying the…
Understanding the mechanisms of species coexistence has always been a fundamental topic in ecology. Classical theory predicts that interspecific competition may select for traits that stabilize niche differences, although recent work shows…
Ecosystems are commonly organized into trophic levels -- organisms that occupy the same level in a food chain (e.g., plants, herbivores, carnivores). A fundamental question in theoretical ecology is how the interplay between trophic…
Vegetation in semi-arid environments self-organizes into striking spatial patterns -- bands, spots, labyrinths, and gaps -- with characteristic wavelengths on the order of tens to hundreds of meters. Existing reaction-diffusion models…
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…
Vegetation patterns are abundant in arid and semiarid ecosystems, but how they form remains unclear. One of the most extended theories lies in the existence of scale-dependent feedbacks (SDF) in plant-to-plant and plant-water interactions.…
The outcome of competition among species is influenced by the spatial distribution of species and effects such as demographic stochasticity, immigration fluxes, and the existence of preferred habitats. We introduce an individual-based model…
The significant role of space in maintaining species coexistence and determining community structure and function is well established. However, community ecology studies have mainly focused on simple competition and predation systems, and…
This is the second of two papers dedicated to the relationship between population models of competition and biodiversity. Here we consider species assembly models where the population dynamics is kept far from fixed points through the…
Competition between species and genotypes is a dominant factor in a variety of ecological and evolutionary processes. Biological dynamics are typically highly stochastic, and therefore, analyzing a competitive system requires accounting for…
A general system of difference equations is presented for multispecies communities with density dependent population growth and delayed maturity. Interspecific competition, mutualism, predation, commensalism, and amensalism are…
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…
Nonuniform spatial distributions of vegetation in scarce environments consist of either gaps, bands often called tiger bush or patches that can be either self-organized or spatially localized in space. When the level of aridity is…
Vegetation in semi-arid ecosystems frequently organizes into spatially heterogeneous mosaics that regulate ecosystem functioning, productivity, and resilience. These patterns arise from local biological interactions, including facilitation…
Phenotypic plasticity is a key factor in driving the evolution of species in the predator-prey interaction. The natural environment is replete with phenotypic plasticity, which is the source of inducible defences against predators,…
The architecture of bipartite networks linking two classes of constituents is affected by the interactions within each class. For the bipartite networks representing the mutualistic relationship between pollinating animals and plants, it…
In natural ecosystems, species can be characterized by the nonlinear density-dependent self-regulation of their growth profile. Species of many taxa show a substantial density-dependent reduction for low population size. Nevertheless, many…
How large ecosystems can create and maintain the remarkable biodiversity we see in nature is probably one of the biggest open questions in science, attracting attention from different fields, from Theoretical Ecology to Mathematics and…
Natural ecosystems are characterized by striking diversity of form and functions and yet exhibit deep symmetries emerging across scales of space, time and organizational complexity. Species-area relationships and species-abundance…