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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…
Discrete time, spatially extended models play an important role in ecology, modelling population dynamics of species ranging from micro-organisms to birds. An important question is how 'bottom up', individual-based models can be…
Natural ecosystems are characterized by striking diversity of form and functions and yet exhibit deep symmetries emerging across scales of space, time and organizational complexity. Species-area relationships and species-abundance…
Understanding the mechanisms of species coexistence has always been a fundamental topic in ecology. Classical theory predicts that interspecific competition may select for traits that stabilize niche differences, although recent work shows…
In order to understand the role of space in ecological communities where each species produces a certain type of resource and has varying abilities to exploit the resources produced by its own species and by the other species, we carry out…
This study investigates the role of spatial segregation, prompted by competition avoidance, as a key mechanism for emergent coexistence within microbial communities. Recognizing these communities as complex adaptive systems, we challenge…
The interplay between space and evolution is an important issue in population dynamics, that is in particular crucial in the emergence of polymorphism and spatial patterns. Recently, biological studies suggest that invasion and evolution…
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…
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…
Turbulence has been recognized as a factor of paramount importance for the survival or extinction of sinking phytoplankton species. However, dealing with its multiscale nature in models of coupled fluid and biological dynamics is a…
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…
The spatial scale of population synchrony gives the characteristic distance at which the population fluctuations are correlated. Therefore, it gives also the characteristic size of the regions of simultaneous population depletion, or even…
The quantitative description of marine systems is constrained by a major issue of scale separation: most marine biochemical processes occur at sub-centimeter scales, while the contribution to the Earth's biogeochemical cycles is expressed…
Explaining coexistence in species-rich communities of primary producers remains a challenge for ecologists because of their likely competition for shared resources. Following Hutchinson's seminal suggestion, many theoreticians have tried to…
We consider a size-structured aggregation and growth model of phytoplankton community proposed by Ackleh and Fitzpatrick [2]. The model accounts for basic biological phenomena in phytoplankton community such as growth, gravitational…
The paradox of the plankton highlights the apparent contradiction between Gause's law of competitive exclusion and the observed diversity of phytoplankton. It is well known that phytoplankton dynamics depend heavily on two main resources:…
The evolution of dispersal rate is studied with a model of several local populations linked by dispersal. Three dispersal strategies are considered where all, half, or none of the offspring disperse. The spatial scale (number of patches)…
The significant role of space in maintaining species coexistence and determining community structure and function is well established. However, community ecology studies have mainly focused on simple competition and predation systems, and…
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…
Different cell types aggregate and sort into hierarchical architectures during the formation of animal tissues. The resulting spatial organization depends (in part) on the strength of adhesion of one cell type to itself relative to other…