Related papers: Probabilistic Measures for Biological Adaptation a…

Continuous adaptation to variable environments is crucial for the survival of living organisms. Here, we analyze how adaptation, forecasting, and resource mobilization towards a target state, termed actionability, interact to determine…

Biologists and physicists have a rich tradition of modeling living systems with simple models composed of a few interacting components. Despite the remarkable success of this approach, it remains unclear how to use such finely tuned models…

The aim of this paper is to propose an alternative behavioural definition of computation (and of a computer) based simply on whether a system is capable of reacting to the environment-the input-as reflected in a measure of programmability.…

Mutualistic communities have an internal structure that makes them resilient to external per- turbations. Late research has focused on their stability and the topology of the relations between the different organisms to explain the reasons…

The response of ecosystems to perturbations is considered from a thermodynamic perspective by acknowledging that, as for all macroscopic systems and processes, the dynamics and stability of ecosystems is subject to definite thermodynamic…

In the study of natural and artificial complex systems, responses that are not completely determined by the considered decision variables are commonly modelled probabilistically, resulting in response distributions varying across decision…

An attractor of a dynamical system may represent the system's 'desirable' state. Perturbations to the system may push the system out of the basin of attraction of the desirable attractor and into undesirable states. Hence, it is important…

Positive feedback and cooperativity in the regulation of gene expression are generally considered to be necessary for obtaining bistable expression states. Recently, a novel mechanism of bistability termed emergent bistability has been…

Already 71 years ago Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow introduced the concept of the "behavioristic study of natural events" and proposed a classification of systems according to the quality of the behaviors they are able to exercise. In…

We study a model ecosystem by means of dynamical techniques from disordered systems theory. The model describes a set of species subject to competitive interactions through a background of resources, which they feed upon. Additionally…

Based on the physics of stochastic processes we present a new approach for structural health monitoring. We show that the new method allows for an in-situ analysis of the elastic features of a mechanical structure even for realistic…

Predicting species persistence within ecological communities is a fundamental challenge for both empirical and theoretical ecology. Existing methods span from mechanistic models, whose parameters are difficult to estimate from data, to…

Throughout the life sciences we routinely seek to interpret measurements and observations using parameterised mechanistic mathematical models. A fundamental and often overlooked choice in this approach involves relating the solution of a…

In ecology it is common for processes to be bounded based on physical constraints of the system. One common example is the positivity constraint, which applies to phenomena such as duration times, population sizes, and total stock of a…

It is of growing concern to ensure the resilience in electricity infrastructure systems to extreme weather events with the help of appropriate hardening measures and new operational procedures. An effective mitigation strategy requires a…

Resilient ecological systems will be better able to maintain their structure and function in the emerging Anthropocene. Estimating the resilience of different systems will therefore provide valuable insight for conservation decision-makers,…

In this paper I will review some basic aspects of the mechanism of stochastic resonance. Stochastic resonance was first introduced as a possible mechanism to explain long term climatic variation. Since then, there have been many…

We propose a new procedure to monitor and forecast the onset of transitions in high dimensional complex systems. We describe our procedure by an application to the Tangled Nature model of evolutionary ecology. The quasi-stable…

Diverse complex dynamical systems are known to exhibit abrupt regime shifts at bifurcation points of the saddle-node type. The dynamics of most of these systems, however, have a stochastic component resulting in noise driven regime shifts…

Robustness, the ability of a system to maintain performance under significant and unanticipated environmental changes, is a critical property for robotic systems. While biological systems naturally exhibit robustness, there is no…