Related papers: Periodic temporal environmental variations induce …
Coevolutionary dynamics is investigated in chemical catalysis, biological evolution, social and economic systems. The dynamics of these systems can be analyzed within the unifying framework of evolutionary game theory. In this Letter, we…
A novel mathematical framework is proposed to describe the ecological and evolutionary consequences of consumer--resource interactions. Both the consumer and resource are assumed to consist of several (sub)species, which interact between…
Populations interact non-linearly and are influenced by environmental fluctuations. In order to have realistic mathematical models, one needs to take into account that the environmental fluctuations are inherently stochastic. Often,…
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…
Anthropogenic activity threatens biodiversity through climate change, habitat fragmentation, and increasing frequency and scale of disturbance. Various theoretical studies have sought to shed light on how these factors could promote or…
We explore how physical scale and population size shape the emergence of complex behaviors in open-ended ecological environments. In our setting, agents are unsupervised and have no explicit rewards or learning objectives but instead evolve…
The behavior of interacting populations typically displays irregular temporal and spatial patterns that are difficult to reconcile with an underlying deterministic dynamics. A classical example is the heterogeneous distribution of plankton…
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…
There is a pressing need to better understand how microbial populations respond to antimicrobial drugs, and to find mechanisms to possibly eradicate antimicrobial-resistant cells. The inactivation of antimicrobials by resistant microbes can…
Classical models for competition between two species usually predict exclusion or divergent evolution of resource exploitation. However, recent experimental data show that coexistence is possible for very similar species competing for the…
Many biological systems regulate phenotypic heterogeneity as a fitness-maximising strategy in uncertain and dynamic environments. Analysis of such strategies is typically confined both to a discrete set of environmental conditions, and to a…
In an ecosystem, environmental changes as a result of natural and human processes can cause some key parameters of the system to change with time. Depending on how fast such a parameter changes, a tipping point can occur. Existing works on…
The abundance of a species' population in an ecosystem is rarely stationary, often exhibiting large fluctuations over time. Using historical data on marine species, we show that the year-to-year fluctuations of population growth rate obey a…
Temporal environmental variations are ubiquitous in nature, yet most of the theoretical works in population genetics and evolution assume fixed environment. Here we analyze the effect of variations in carrying capacity on the fate of a…
Relations among species in ecosystems can be represented by complex networks where both negative (competition) and positive (mutualism) interactions are concurrently present. Recently, it has been shown that many ecosystems can be cast into…
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…
Selection in a time-periodic environment is modeled via the continuous-time two-player replicator dynamics, which for symmetric pay-offs reduces to the Fisher equation of mathematical genetics. For a sufficiently rapid and cyclic…
The environment in which a population evolves can have a crucial impact on selection. We study evolutionary dynamics in finite populations of fixed size in a changing environment. The population dynamics are driven by birth and death…
We address a novel approach for stochastic individual-based modelling of a single species population. Individuals are distinguished by their remaining lifetimes, which are regulated by the interplay between the inexorable running of time…
Artificial ecosystems provide an additional experimental tool to support laboratory work, field work, and theoretical development in competitive exclusion research. A novel application of a spatiotemporal agent based model is presented…