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The self-protection of alliances against external invaders is a key concept behind the maintenance of biodiversity in the face of natural selection. But since these alliances, which can be formed by different numbers of competitors, can…
Differential diffusion is a source of instability in population dynamics systems when species diffuse with different rates. Predator-prey systems show this instability only under certain specific conditions, usually requiring Holling-type…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
We conducted an investigation of the effect that extreme variability of the individual's environment has in the individual's adaptability and, in general, in the co-evolution of a population. First we assume that the individuals are a kind…
We investigate the phenomenology emerging from a 2-species dynamics under the scenario of a quasi-neutral competition within a metapopulation framework. We employ stochastic and deterministic approaches, namely spatially-constrained…
We develop a theoretical framework to understand the persistence and coexistence of competitive species in a spatially explicit metacommunity model with a heterogeneous dispersal kernel. Our analysis, based on methods from the physics of…
Climate changes may affect ecosystems destabilising relationships among species. We investigate the spatial rock-paper-scissors models with a regional unevenness that reduces the selection capacity of organisms of one species. Our results…
If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…
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…
Microbial communities are ubiquitous in nature and come in a multitude of forms, ranging from communities dominated by a handful of species to communities containing a wide variety of metabolically distinct organisms. This huge range in…
High-throughput sequencing techniques such as metagenomic and metatranscriptomic technologies allow cataloging of functional characteristics of microbial community members as well as their taxonomic identity. Such studies have found that a…
We study a dynamic model of ecosystems where immigration plays an essential role both in assembling the species community and in mantaining its biodiversity. This framework is particularly relevant for insular ecosystems. Population…
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,…
Ecosystems are commonly organized into trophic levels -- organisms that occupy the same level in a food chain (e.g., plants, herbivores, carnivores). A fundamental question in theoretical ecology is how the interplay between trophic…
A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special conceptual challenges because of the strong mutual influences…
Intraspecific trait variation has been increasingly recognized as an important factor in determining species interaction and diversity. Eco-evolutionary models have studied the distribution of trait values within a population that changes…
Much of our understanding of ecological and evolutionary mechanisms derives from analysis of low-dimensional models: with few interacting species, or few axes defining "fitness". It is not always clear to what extent the intuition derived…
Biodiversity loss driven by agricultural intensification is a pressing global issue, with significant implications for ecosystem stability and human well-being. Existing policy instruments have so far proven insufficient in halting this…
Competition indices are models frequently used in ecology to account for the impact of density and resource distribution on the growth of a plant population. They allow to define simple individual-based models, by integrating information…