Related papers: Interspecific competition shapes the structural st…
We analyze the properties of seven community food webs from a variety of environments--including freshwater, marine-freshwater interfaces and terrestrial environments. We uncover quantitative unifying patterns that describe the properties…
A recent paper by James et al. finds that mutualistic interactions decrease the biodiversity of model ecosystems. However, this result can be reverted if we consider ecological trade-offs and choose parameters suitable for sparse…
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…
We extend the study of a model of competitive cluster growth in an active medium to a basis of networks; this is done by adding nonlocal connections with probability $p$ to sites on a regular lattice, thus enabling one to interpolate…
Complex networks often have a modular structure, where a number of tightly- connected groups of nodes (modules) have relatively few interconnections. Modularity had been shown to have an important effect on the evolution and stability of…
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…
Competitive exclusion, a key principle of ecology, can be generalized to understand many other complex systems. Individuals under surviving pressure tend to be different from others, and correlations among them change correspondingly to the…
The recent discovery of universal principles underlying many complex networks occurring across a wide range of length scales in the biological world has spurred physicists in trying to understand such features using techniques from…
The relationship between the dynamics of a community and its constituent pairwise interactions is a fundamental problem in ecology. Higher-order ecological effects beyond pairwise interactions may be key to complex ecosystems, but…
Understanding how species persist under interacting stressors is a central challenge in ecology. We develop a spatially explicit reaction-diffusion framework to investigate competing species in landscapes shaped by climate variability,…
Identifying and explaining the structure of complex networks at different scales has become an important problem across disciplines. At the mesoscale, modular architecture has attracted most of the attention. At the macroscale, other…
Competition networks are formed via adversarial interactions between actors. The Dynamic Competition Hypothesis predicts that influential actors in competition networks should have a large number of common out-neighbors with many other…
To understand the biodiversity of an ecosystem cannot be understood by solely analyzing the pair relations of competing species. Instead, we should consider multi-point interactions because the presence of a third party could change the…
Recent empirical work highlights the heterogeneity of social competitions such as political campaigns: proponents of some ideologies seek debate and conversation, others create echo chambers. While symmetric and static network structure is…
The dynamics of two competing species in a finite size community is one of the most studied problems in population genetics and community ecology. Stochastic fluctuations lead, inevitably, to the extinction of one of the species, but the…
We derive an analytical approximation for making quantitative predictions for ecological communities as a function of the mean intensity of the inter-specific competition and the species richness. This method, with only a fraction of the…
The competitive exclusion principle asserts that coexisting species must occupy distinct ecological niches (i.e. the number of surviving species can not exceed the number of resources). An open question is to understand if and how different…
Fluctuating environments are situations where the spatio-temporal stochasticity plays a significant role in the evolutionary dynamics. The study of the evolution of cooperation in these environments typically assumes a homogeneous, well…
Just as a herd of animals relies on its robust social structure to survive in the wild, similarly robustness is a crucial characteristic for the survival of a complex network under attack. The capacity to measure robustness in complex…
Competition between a complex system's constituents and a corresponding reward mechanism based on it have profound influence on the functioning, stability, and evolution of the system. But determining the dominance hierarchy or ranking…