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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…
Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…
The ability of random environmental variation to stabilize competitor coexistence was pointed out long ago and, in recent years, has received considerable attention. Analyses have focused on variations in the log-abundances of species, with…
Understanding the evolutionary stability of cooperation is a central problem in biology, sociology, and economics. There exist only a few known mechanisms that guarantee the existence of cooperation and its robustness to cheating. Here, we…
The soil seed bank is a major component of plant communities. However, long-term analyses of the dynamics of the seed bank and the ensuing vegetation are rare. Here, we studied the dynamics in plant communities with high dominance of…
The processes and mechanisms underlying the origin and maintenance of biological diversity have long been of central importance in ecology and evolution. The competitive exclusion principle states that the number of coexisting species is…
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…
The observation that phenotypic variability is ubiquitous in isogenic populations has led to a multitude of experimental and theoretical studies seeking to probe the causes and consequences of this variability. Whether it be in the context…
Dispersal is a well recognized driver of ecological and evolutionary dynamics, and simultaneously an evolving trait. Dispersal evolution has traditionally been studied in single-species metapopulations so that it remains unclear how…
Why are large, complex ecosystems stable? Both theory and simulations of current models predict the onset of instability with growing size and complexity, so for decades it has been conjectured that ecosystems must have some unidentified…
The foundational concepts behind the persistence of ecological communities have been based on two ecological properties: dynamical stability and feasibility. The former is typically regarded as the capacity of a community to return to an…
Ecosystems frequently display the coexistence of diverse species under resource competition, typically resulting in skewed distributions of rarity and abundance. A potential driver of such coexistence is environmental fluctuations that…
Mutualisms are key for structuring ecological communities, but they are sensitive to environmental change and fluctuations in population size. Consequently, how mutualisms achieve stability remains an open question in ecological theory.…
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…
Microbial adaptation to extreme stress, such as starvation, antimicrobial exposure, or freezing often reveals fundamental trade-offs between survival and proliferation. Understanding how populations navigate these trade-offs in fluctuating…
We consider a system of interacting Fisher-Wright diffusions with seed-bank. Individuals live in colonies and are subject to resampling and migration as long as they are active. Each colony has a structured seed-bank into which individuals…
Reaction-diffusion systems with a Lotka-Volterra-type reaction term, also known as competition-diffusion systems, have been used to investigate the dynamics of the competition among $m$ ecological species for a limited resource necessary to…
At what level does selective pressure effectively act? When considering the reproductive dynamics of interacting and mutating agents, it has long been debated whether selection is better understood by focusing on the individual or if…
In large clonal populations, several clones generally compete which results in complex evolutionary and ecological dynamics: experiments show successive selective sweeps of favorable mutations as well as long-term coexistence of multiple…
A fundamental problem in evolutionary ecology research is to explain how different species coexist in natural ecosystems. This question is directly related with species trophic competition. However, competition theory, based on the…