Related papers: The storage effect is not about bet-hedging or pop…
Vegetation patterns are a ubiquitous feature of water-deprived ecosystems. Despite the competition for the same limiting resource, coexistence of several plant species is commonly observed. We propose a two-species reaction-diffusion model…
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…
Ecological theory predicts that the soil seed bank stabilises the composition of annual plant communities in the face of environmental variability. However, long-term data on the community dynamics in the seed bank and the standing…
D. discoideum has been recently suggested as an example of bet-hedging. Upon starvation a population of unicellular amoebae splits between aggregators, which form a fruiting body made of a stalk and resistant spores, and non-aggregators.…
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…
The paper explores the influence of harvesting (or culling) on the outcome of the competition of two species in a spatially heterogeneous environment. The harvesting effort is assumed to be proportional to the space-dependent intrinsic…
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…
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…
Microbial populations generally evolve in volatile environments, under conditions fluctuating between harsh and mild, e.g. as the result of sudden changes in toxin concentration or nutrient abundance. Environmental variability thus shapes…
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…
Over the past century, nonlinear difference and differential equations have been used to understand conditions for species coexistence. However, these models fail to account for random fluctuations due to demographic and environmental…
Life-history tradeoffs among species are major drivers of community assembly. Most studies investigate how tradeoffs promote deterministic coexistence of species. It remains unclear how tradeoffs may instead promote historically contingent…
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…
In a wide variety of natural systems, closely-related microbial strains coexist stably, resulting in high levels of fine-scale biodiversity. However, the mechanisms that stabilize this coexistence are not fully understood. Spatial…
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…
Phenotypic heterogeneity is a strategy commonly used by bacteria to rapidly adapt to changing environmental conditions. Here, we study the interplay between phenotypic heterogeneity and genetic diversity in spatially extended populations.…
In order to understand the role of space in ecological communities where each species produces a certain type of resource and has varying abilities to exploit the resources produced by its own species and by the other species, we carry out…
Recent work draws attention to community-community encounters ("coalescence") as likely an important factor shaping natural ecosystems. This work builds on MacArthur's classic model of competitive coexistence to investigate such…
In environments that vary frequently and unpredictably, bet-hedgers can overtake the population. Diversifying bet-hedgers have a diverse set of offspring so that, no matter the conditions they find themselves in, at least some offspring…
Frequency-dependent selection reflects the interaction between different species as they battle for limited resources in their environment. In a stochastic evolutionary game the species relative fitnesses guides the evolutionary dynamics…