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Explaining biodiversity is a central focus in theoretical ecology. A significant obstacle arises from the Competitive Exclusion Principle (CEP), which states that two species competing for the same type of resources cannot coexist at…
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…
Several theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explain observed biodiversity patterns, ranging from the classical niche-based theories, mainly employing a continuous formalism, to neutral theories, based on statistical mechanics of…
Environmental stochasticity is known to be a destabilizing factor, increasing abundance fluctuations and extinction rates of populations. However, the stability of a community may benefit from the differential response of species to…
Recent work suggests that cross-feeding -- the secretion and consumption of metabolic biproducts by microbes -- is essential for understanding microbial ecology. Yet how cross-feeding and competition combine to give rise to ecosystem-level…
Understanding the behaviors of ecological systems is challenging given their multi-faceted complexity. To proceed, theoretical models such as Lotka-Volterra dynamics with random interactions have been investigated by the dynamical…
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…
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…
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…
Anthropogenic activity threatens biodiversity through climate change, habitat fragmentation, and increasing frequency and scale of disturbance. Various theoretical studies have sought to shed light on how these factors could promote or…
We study how the complexity of evolutionary dynamics in the classic MacArthur consumer-resource model depends on resource uptake and utilization rates. The traditional assumption in such models is that the utilization rate of the consumer…
Geographic ranges of communities of species evolve in response to environmental, ecological, and evolutionary forces. Understanding the effects of these forces on species' range dynamics is a major goal of spatial ecology. Previous…
We investigate the formation of stable ecological networks where many species share the same resource. We show that such stable ecosystem naturally occurs as a result of extinctions. We obtain an analytical relation for the number of…
Stochastic models of diffusion with excluded-volume effects are used to model many biological and physical systems at a discrete level. The average properties of the population may be described by a continuum model based on partial…
We show how highly-diverse ecological communities may display persistent abundance fluctuations, when interacting through resource competition and subjected to migration from a species pool. This turns out to be closely related to the ratio…
The processes and mechanisms underlying the origin and maintenance of biological diversity have long been of central importance in ecology and evolution. The competitive exclusion principle states that the number of coexisting species is…
A central goal in ecology is to understand how biodiversity is maintained. Previous theoretical works have employed the rock-paper-scissors (RPS) game as a toy model, demonstrating that population mobility is crucial in determining the…
Patterned vegetation is a characteristic feature of many dryland ecosystems. While plant densities on the ecosystem-wide scale are typically low, a spatial self-organisation principle leads to the occurrence of alternating patches of high…
The role of the selection pressure and mutation amplitude on the behavior of a single-species population evolving on a two-dimensional lattice, in a periodically changing environment, is studied both analytically and numerically. The…
Given an endogenous timescale set by invasion in a constant environment, we introduced periodic temporal variation in competitive superiority by alternating the species' propagation rates. By manipulating habitat size and introduction rate,…