Related papers: Coexistence in spatiotemporally fluctuating enviro…
Understanding under what conditions interacting populations, whether they be plants, animals, or viral particles, coexist is a question of theoretical and practical importance in population biology. Both biotic interactions and…
Individuals within any species exhibit differences in size, developmental state, or spatial location. These differences coupled with environmental fluctuations in demographic rates can have subtle effects on population persistence and…
In this paper, we discuss the conceptual underpinnings of Modern Coexistence Theory (MCT), a quantitative framework for understanding ecological coexistence. In order to use MCT to infer how species are coexisting, one must relate a complex…
Classical ecological models predict that large, diverse communities should be unstable, presenting a central challenge to explaining the stable biodiversity seen in nature. We revisit this long-standing problem by extending the generalized…
We analyze a general theory for coexistence and extinction of ecological communities that are influenced by stochastic temporal environmental fluctuations. The results apply to discrete time (stochastic difference equations), continuous…
Understanding the relationship between complexity and stability in large dynamical systems -- such as ecosystems -- remains a key open question in complexity theory which has inspired a rich body of work developed over more than fifty…
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…
How large ecosystems can create and maintain the remarkable biodiversity we see in nature is probably one of the biggest open questions in science, attracting attention from different fields, from Theoretical Ecology to Mathematics and…
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…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
Does an ecological community allow stable coexistence? Identifying the general principles that determine the answer to this question is a central problem of theoretical ecology. Random matrix theory approaches have uncovered the general…
Ecological communities are composed of species interactions that respond to environmental fluctuations. Despite increasing evidence of temporal variation in these interactions, most theoretical frameworks remain rooted in static…
Dynamics of a social population is analyzed taking into account some physical constraints on individual behavior and decision making abilities. The model, based on Evolutionary Game Theory, predicts that a population has to pass through a…
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…
Multicomponent phase separation is a routine occurrence in both living and synthetic systems. Thermodynamics provides a straightforward path to determine the phase boundaries that characterize these transitions for systems at equilibrium.…
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…
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…
Exerting fluctuations is a part of our daily life: traffic noise, heartbeat, opinion poll, currency exchange rate, electrical current, chemical reactions - they all permanently fluctuate. One of the most important questions is why the…
How do species coexist? A framework known as Modern Coexistence Theory measures mechanisms of coexistence by comparing a species perturbed to low density (the invader) to other species that remain at their typical densities (the residents);…
The storage effect is a general explanation for ecological coexistence, wherein different species specialize on different states of a fluctuating environment, e.g., hot vs. cold years. Despite the storage effect's prominence in theoretical…