Related papers: Coalescent dynamics of planktonic communities

Living systems exhibit complex yet organized behavior on multiple spatiotemporal scales. To investigate the nature of multiscale coordination in living systems, one needs a meaningful and systematic way to quantify the complex dynamics, a…

Mutualistic interactions, where individuals from different species can benefit from each other, are widespread across ecosystems. This study develops a general deterministic model of mutualism involving two populations, assuming that…

There is mounting empirical evidence that many communities of living organisms display key features which closely resemble those of physical systems at criticality. We here introduce a minimal model framework for the dynamics of a community…

The processes taking place inside the living cell are now understood to the point where predictive computational models can be used to gain detailed understanding of important biological phenomena. A key challenge is to extrapolate this…

We propose a model of multispecies populations surviving on distributed resources. System dynamics are investigated under changes in abiotic factors such as the climate, as parameterized through environmental temperature. In particular, we…

The coexistence of multiple phytoplankton species despite their reliance on similar resources is often explained with mean-field models assuming mixed populations. In reality, observations of phytoplankton indicate spatial aggregation at…

The relative importance of Lagrangian and population dynamics on spatial pattern formation in the distribution of plankton near the ocean's surface is investigated. Phytoplankton and zooplankton are treated as biologically interacting…

What determines biodiversity in nature is a prominent issue in ecology, especially in biotic resource systems that are typically devoid of cross-feeding. Here, we show that by incorporating pairwise encounters among consumer individuals…

Mutualistic networks provide a powerful way to describe and analyse plant-pollinator communities and their structure over time. While these networks capture the complex interdependencies that link population fates across the season, they…

In recent years modelling crowd and evacuation dynamics has become very important, with increasing huge numbers of people gathering around the world for many reasons and events. The fact that our global population grows dramatically every…

Many animal groups are heterogeneous and may even consist of individuals of different species, called mixed-species flocks. Mathematical and computational models of collective animal movement behaviour, however, typically assume that groups…

Local coexistence of species in large ecosystems is traditionally explained within the broad framework of niche theory. However, its rationale hardly justifies rich biodiversity observed in nearly homogeneous environments. Here we consider…

An important challenge in theoretical ecology is to find good, coarse-grained representations of complex food webs. Here we use the approach of generalized modeling to show that it may be possible to formulate a coarse-graining algorithm…

Population structure can have a significant effect on evolution. For some systems with sufficient symmetry, analytic results can be derived within the mathematical framework of evolutionary graph theory which relate to the outcome of the…

We study a dynamic model of ecosystems where immigration plays an essential role both in assembling the species community and in mantaining its biodiversity. This framework is particularly relevant for insular ecosystems. Population…

A complex interplay between species governs the evolution of spatial patterns in ecology. An open problem in the biological sciences is characterising spatio-temporal data and understanding how changes at the local scale affect global…

Bacteria and plankton populations living in oceans and lakes reproduce and die under the in- fluence of turbulent currents. Turbulent transport interacts in a complex way with the dynamics of populations because the typical reproduction…

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…

In both natural and artificial studies, evolution is often seen as synonymous to natural selection. Individuals evolve under pressures set by environments that are either reset or do not carry over significant changes from previous…

Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…