Related papers: Evolutionary drivers, morphological evolution and …
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
The coupling between evolutionary and ecological changes (eco-evolutionary dynamics) has been shown to be relevant among diverse species, and is also of interest outside of ecology, i.e. in cancer evolution. These dynamics play an important…
The Earth's climate has experienced numerous critical transitions during its history, which have often been accompanied by massive and rapid changes in the biosphere. Such transitions are evidenced in various proxy records covering…
The Eocene-Oligocene transition marks a watershed point of earth's climate history. The climate shifts from a greenhouse state to an icehouse state in which Antarctica glaciated for the first time and periodic dynamics arise which are still…
Fluctuations in biodiversity, large and small, are pervasive in the fossil record, yet we do not understand the processes generating them. Here we extend theory from non-equilibrium statistical physics to describe the previously unaccounted…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…
In many species, genomic data have revealed pervasive adaptive evolution indicated by the fixation of beneficial alleles. However, when selection pressures are highly variable along a species range or through time adaptive alleles may…
Cyclic dominance of competing species is an intensively used working hypothesis to explain biodiversity in certain living systems, where the evolutionary selection principle would dictate a single victor otherwise. Technically the…
When can complex ecological interactions drive an entire ecosystem into a persistent non-equilibrium state, where species abundances keep fluctuating without going to extinction? We show that high-diversity spatially-extended systems, in…
Evolutionary hypotheses to explain the greater numbers of species in the tropics than the temperate zone include greater age and area, higher temperature and metabolic rates, and greater ecological opportunity. These ideas make contrasting…
Genomic data are rapidly resolving the tree of living species calibrated to time, the timetree of life, which will provide a framework for research in diverse fields of science. Previous analyses of taxonomically restricted timetrees have…
Studies of transient dynamics captures the time history of any dramatic changes in the dynamics of a system. The transient dynamics is investigated here in a classic ecological model of a bistable tri-trophic food chain. All the species in…
The role of the selection pressure and mutation amplitude on the behavior of a single-species population evolving on a two-dimensional lattice, in a periodically changing environment, is studied both analytically and numerically. The…
Eco-evolutionary dynamics, or eco-evolution for short, are thought to involve rapid demography (ecology) and equally rapid phenotypic changes (evolution) leading to novel, emergent system behaviours. This focus on contemporary dynamics is…
We investigate evolutionary dynamics related to periodicity fossil biodiversity. Coherent periodic fluctuation in origination/extinction of marine genera that survive <45 million years is the source of an observed ~62 million year…
Highly-diverse ecosystems exhibit a broad distribution of population sizes and species turnover, where species at high and low abundances are exchanged over time. We show that these two features generically emerge in the fluctuating phase…
Despite numerous mass extinctions in the Phanerozoic eon, the overall trend in biodiversity evolution was not blocked and the life has never been wiped out. Almost all possible catastrophic events (large igneous province, asteroid impact,…
Given an endogenous timescale set by invasion in a constant environment, we introduced periodic temporal variation in competitive superiority by alternating the species' propagation rates. By manipulating habitat size and introduction rate,…
Ecological systems are complex dynamical systems. Modelling efforts on ecosystems' dynamical stability have revealed that population dynamics, being highly nonlinear, can be governed by complex fluctuations. Indeed, experimental and field…
Cretaceous-Cenozoic history of angiosperms led to the a certain character of the distribution of taxa of different levels (the number of species and genera in families, species/genera ratio in families, the number of species in the genera).…