Related papers: Multiple Phase Transitions Shape Biodiversity of a…
Cooperative interactions pervade in a broad range of many-body populations, such as ecological communities, social organizations, and economic webs. We investigate the dynamics of a population of two equivalent species A and B that are…
Finite-size fluctuations arising in the dynamics of competing populations may have dramatic influence on their fate. As an example, in this article, we investigate a model of three species which dominate each other in a cyclic manner.…
Structure, composition and stability of ecological populations are shaped by the inter- and intra-species interactions within these communities. It remains to be fully understood how the interplay of these interactions with other factors,…
Rapidly mutating pathogens may be able to persist in the population and reach an endemic equilibrium by escaping hosts' acquired immunity. For such diseases, multiple biological, environmental and population-level mechanisms determine the…
Complex evolving systems such as the biosphere, ecosystems and societies exhibit sudden collapses, for reasons that are only partially understood. Here we study this phenomenon using a mathematical model of a system that evolves under…
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…
Natural ecosystems, in particular on the microbial scale, are inhabited by a large number of species. The population size of each species is affected by interactions of individuals with each other and by spatial and temporal changes in…
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…
Mutations in a microbial population can increase the frequency of a genotype not only by increasing its exponential growth rate, but also by decreasing its lag time or adjusting the yield (resource efficiency). The contribution of multiple…
Population dynamics is constrained by the environment, which needs to obey certain conditions to support population growth. We consider a standard model for the evolution of a single species population density, that includes reproduction,…
Environment plays a fundamental role in the competition for resources, and hence in the evolution of populations. Here, we study a well-mixed, finite population consisting of two strains competing for the limited resources provided by an…
Cyclic, nonhierarchical interactions among biological species represent a general mechanism by which ecosystems are able to maintain high levels of biodiversity. However, species coexistence is often possible only in spatially extended…
In studies of cultural differentiation, the joint mechanisms of homophily and influence have been able to explain how distinct cultural groups can form. While these mechanisms normally lead to cultural convergence, increased levels of…
Cell-to-cell variability is inherent to numerous biological processes, including cell migration. Quantifying and characterizing the variability of migrating cells is challenging, as it requires monitoring many cells for long time windows…
Stochastic models that incorporate birth, death and immigration (also called birth-death and innovation models) are ubiquitous and applicable to many research topics such as quantifying species sizes in ecological populations, describing…
We present a non-neutral stochastic model for the dynamics taking place in a meta-community ecosystems in presence of migration. The model provides a framework for describing the emergence of multiple ecological scenarios and behaves in two…
The maintenance of diversity, the `commonness of rarity', and compositional turnover are ubiquitous features of species-rich communities. Through a minimal model, we consider how these features reflect the interplay between environmental…
The biological requirements for an ecosystem to develop and maintain species diversity are in general unknown. Here we consider a model ecosystem of sessile and mutually excluding organisms competing for space [Mathiesen et al. Phys. Rev.…
Numerous experimental studies have demonstrated that the microenvironment is a key regulator influencing the proliferative and migrative potentials of species. Spatial and temporal disturbances lead to adverse and hazardous…
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…