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Efficient search acts as a strong selective force in biological systems ranging from cellular populations to predator-prey systems. The search processes commonly involve finding a stationary or mobile target within a heterogeneously…
Problem-solving competence at group level is influenced by the structure of the social networks and so it may shed light on the organization patterns of gregarious animals. Here we use an agent-based model to investigate whether the…
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has long been an area of substantial interest to ecologists because most fundamental biological processes, such as protein synthesis and respiration, are inherently energy-consuming. Microbial communities are…
A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special conceptual challenges because of the strong mutual influences…
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…
In environments with scarce resources, adopting the right search strategy can make the difference between succeeding and failing, even between life and death. At different scales, this applies to molecular encounters in the cell cytoplasm,…
The competition for resources is a defining feature of microbial communities. In many contexts, from soils to host-associated communities, highly diverse microbes are organized into metabolic groups or guilds with similar resource…
In some social and biological networks, the majority of nodes belong to multiple communities. It has recently been shown that a number of the algorithms that are designed to detect overlapping communities do not perform well in such highly…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
Collective animal movement fascinates children and scientists alike. One of the most commonly given explanations for collective animal movement is improved foraging. Animals are hypothesized to gain from searching for food in groups. Here,…
We address the problem where a mobile search agent seeks to find an unknown number of stationary objects distributed in a bounded search domain, and the search mission is subject to time/distance constraint. Our work accounts for false…
Motile organisms often use finite spatial perception of their surroundings to navigate and search their habitats. Yet standard models of search are usually based on purely local sensory information. To model how a finite perceptual horizon…
Biological and cultural inspired optimization algorithms are nowadays part of the basic toolkit of a great many research domains. By mimicking processes in nature and animal societies, these general-purpose search algorithms promise to…
Agglomerative clustering is a well established strategy for identifying communities in networks. Communities are successively merged into larger communities, coarsening a network of actors into a more manageable network of communities. The…
Decision tree learning is a widely used approach in machine learning, favoured in applications that require concise and interpretable models. Heuristic methods are traditionally used to quickly produce models with reasonably high accuracy.…
High-throughput sequencing techniques such as metagenomic and metatranscriptomic technologies allow cataloging of functional characteristics of microbial community members as well as their taxonomic identity. Such studies have found that a…
In business, politics and life, folk wisdom encourages people to aim for above-average results, but to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Here, we mathematically formalize and extend this folk wisdom. We model a time-limited…
In the commons, communities whose growth depends on public goods, individuals often rely on surprisingly simple strategies, or heuristics, to decide whether to contribute to the common good (at risk of exploitation by free-riders). Although…
Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…
Community structure is one of the most important features of complex networks. Modularity-based methods for community detection typically rely on heuristic algorithms to optimize a specific community quality function. Such methods are…