Related papers: Local adaptation, phenotypic plasticity, and speci…
Despite the general acknowledgment of the role of niche and fitness differences in community dynamics, species abundance has been coined as a relevant feature not just regarding niche perspectives, but also according to neutral…
The diversity and quality of natural systems have been a puzzle and inspiration for communities studying artificial life. It is now widely admitted that the adaptation mechanisms enabling these properties are largely influenced by the…
The role of species interactions in controlling the interplay between the stability of an ecosystem and its biodiversity is still not well understood. The ability of ecological communities to recover after a small perturbation of the…
We study the conditions under which species interaction, as described by continuous versions of the competitive Lotka-Volterra model (namely the nonlocal Kolmogorov-Fisher model, and its differential approximation), can support the…
Phenotypic plasticity is a key factor in driving the evolution of species in the predator-prey interaction. The natural environment is replete with phenotypic plasticity, which is the source of inducible defences against predators,…
The outcome of competition among species is influenced by the spatial distribution of species and effects such as demographic stochasticity, immigration fluxes, and the existence of preferred habitats. We introduce an individual-based model…
Resource competition is a fundamental interaction in natural communities.However little is known about competition in spatial environments where organisms are able to regulate resource distributions. Here, we analyze the competition of two…
A microscopic model is developed, within the frame of the theory of quantitative traits, to study both numerically and analytically the combined effect of competition and assortativity on the sympatric speciation process, i.e. speciation in…
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…
In its simplest form, the competitive exclusion principle states that a number of species competing for a smaller number of resources cannot coexist. However, it has been observed empirically that in some settings it is possible to have…
A mechanism of sympatric speciation is presented based on the interaction-induced developmental plasticity of phenotypes. First, phenotypes of individuals with identical genotypes split into a few groups, according to instability in the…
Metapopulation models have been instrumental in demonstrating the ecological impact of landscape structure on the survival of a focal species in complex environments. However, extensions to multiple species with arbitrary dispersal networks…
The properties of competition models where all individuals are identical are relatively well-understood; however, juveniles and adults can experience or generate competition differently. We study here less well-known structured competition…
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…
Speciation is often associated with geographical barriers that limit gene flow. However, species can also emerge in continuous homogeneous environments through isolation by distance. When the environment is not homogeneous, natural…
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.…
We introduce and analyze a spatial Lotka-Volterra competition model with local and nonlocal interactions. We study two alternative classes of nonlocal competition that differ in how each species' characteristics determine the range of the…
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…
This is the second of two papers dedicated to the relationship between population models of competition and biodiversity. Here we consider species assembly models where the population dynamics is kept far from fixed points through the…
I examine the effect of exogenous spatial heterogeneity on the coexistence of competing species using a simple model of non-hierarchical competition for site occupancy on a lattice. The sites on the lattice are divided into two types…