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Population survival depends on a large set of factors that includes environment structure. Due to landscape heterogeneity, species can occupy particular regions that provide the ideal scenario for development, working as a refuge from…
The margins within the geographic range of species are often specific in terms of ecological and evolutionary processes, and can strongly influence the species' reaction to climate change. One of the frequently observed features at range…
Rare evolutionary events, such as the rise to prominence of deleterious mutations, can have drastic impacts on the evolution of growing populations. Heterogeneous environments may reduce the influence of selection on evolutionary outcomes…
The spread of infectious disease and the evolution of antigenically distinct strains are often modeled separately, despite strong feedbacks mediated by host immune memory and heterogeneous contacts. To tackle this challenging problem, we…
We present a model for diffusion in a molecularly crowded environment. The model consists of random barriers in percolation network. Random walks in the presence of slowly moving barriers show normal diffusion for long times, but anomalous…
In some systems, the behavior of the constituent units can create a `context' that modifies the direct interactions among them. This mechanism of indirect modification inspired us to develop a minimal model of context-dependent spreading.…
We investigate the evolutionary rescue of a microbial population in a gradually deteriorating environment, through a combination of analytical calculations and stochastic simulations. We consider a population destined for extinction in the…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…
Complex spatial structure, with partially isolated subpopulations, and environment heterogeneity, such as gradients in nutrients, oxygen, and drugs, both shape the evolution of natural populations. We investigate the impact of environment…
Percolation, the formation of a macroscopic connected component, is a key feature in the description of complex networks. The dynamical properties of a variety of systems can be understood in terms of percolation, including the robustness…
Interactions in natural communities can be highly heterogeneous, with any given species interacting appreciably with only some of the others, a situation commonly represented by sparse interaction networks. We study the consequences of…
When a biological population expands into new territory, genetic drift develops an enormous influence on evolution at the propagating front. In such range expansion processes, fluctuations in allele frequencies occur through stochastic…
The presence of one or more species at some spatial locations but not others is a central matter in ecology. This phenomenon is related to ecological pattern formation. Nonlocal interactions can be considered as one of the mechanisms…
For a branching process in random environment it is assumed that the offspring distribution of the individuals varies in a random fashion, independently from one generation to the other. For the subcritical regime a kind of phase transition…
Transport across heterogeneous, patchy environments is a ubiquitous phenomenon spanning fields of study including ecological movement, intracellular transport and regions of specialised function in a cell. These regions or patches may be…
We have developed a mathematical model that captures stress-induced mutagenesis, a fundamental aspect of pathogenic and neoplastic evolutionary dynamics, on the fitness landscape with multiple relevant genetic traits as a high-dimensional…
The presence of phenomena analogous to phase transition in Statistical Mechanics, has been suggested in the evolution of a polygenic trait under stabilizing selection, mutation and genetic drift. By using numerical simulations of a model…
Dispersal networks critically shape the fate of ecological communities, yet the mechanisms linking connectivity and persistence remain poorly understood. We show that an interplay between asymmetric dispersal and asynchronous dynamics…
Spatial reciprocity is a well known tour de force of cooperation promotion. A thorough understanding of the effects of different population densities is therefore crucial. Here we study the evolution of cooperation in social dilemmas on…
Understanding how species persist under interacting stressors is a central challenge in ecology. We develop a spatially explicit reaction-diffusion framework to investigate competing species in landscapes shaped by climate variability,…