Related papers: Structured interactions as a stabilizing mechanism…
Ecological systems comprise an astonishing diversity of species that cooperate or compete with each other forming complex mutual dependencies. The minimum requirements to maintain a large species diversity on long time scales are in general…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Structure, composition and stability of ecological populations are shaped by the inter- and intra-species interactions within these communities. It remains to be fully understood how the interplay of these interactions with other factors,…
Individuals within any species exhibit differences in size, developmental state, or spatial location. These differences coupled with environmental fluctuations in demographic rates can have subtle effects on population persistence and…
When three species compete cyclically in a well-mixed, stochastic system of $N$ individuals, extinction is known to typically occur at times scaling as the system size $N$. This happens, for example, in rock-paper-scissors games or…
Ecosystems are formed by networks of species and their interactions. Traditional models of such interactions assume a constant interaction strength between a given pair of species. However, there is often significant trait variation among…
Local coexistence of species in large ecosystems is traditionally explained within the broad framework of niche theory. However, its rationale hardly justifies rich biodiversity observed in nearly homogeneous environments. Here we consider…
Cyclic, nonhierarchical interactions among biological species represent a general mechanism by which ecosystems are able to maintain high levels of biodiversity. However, species coexistence is often possible only in spatially extended…
If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…
Empirical observations show that ecological communities can have a huge number of coexisting species, also with few or limited number of resources. These ecosystems are characterized by multiple type of interactions, in particular…
Empirical observations show that ecological communities can have a huge number of coexisting species, also with few or limited number of resources. These ecosystems are characterized by multiple type of interactions, in particular…
What determines biodiversity in nature is a prominent issue in ecology, especially in biotic resource systems that are typically devoid of cross-feeding. Here, we show that by incorporating pairwise encounters among consumer individuals…
This is the first of two papers where we discuss the limits imposed by competition to the biodiversity of species communities. In this first paper we study the coexistence of competing species at the fixed point of population dynamic…
The consensus that complexity begets stability in ecosystems was challenged in the seventies, a result recently extended to ecologically-inspired networks. The approaches assume the existence of a feasible equilibrium, i.e. with positive…
Models of coordinated behavior of populations living in the same environment are introduced for the cases when they either compete with each other, or they both gain by mutual interactions, or finally when one hunts the other one. The…
We show how highly-diverse ecological communities may display persistent abundance fluctuations, when interacting through resource competition and subjected to migration from a species pool. This turns out to be closely related to the ratio…