Related papers: Patchy landscapes promote stability of small group…
How do landscape fragmentation affects ecosystems diversity and stability is an important and complex question in ecology with no simple answer, as spatially separated habitats where species live are highly dynamic rather than just static.…
On a global level, ecological communities are being perturbed at an unprecedented rate by human activities and environmental instabilities. Yet, we understand little about what factors facilitate or impede long-term persistence of these…
Coexistence of individuals with different species or phenotypes is often found in nature in spite of competition between them. Stable coexistence of multiple types of individuals have implications for maintenance of ecological biodiversity…
Ecosystems are formed by networks of species and their interactions. Traditional models of such interactions assume a constant interaction strength between a given pair of species. However, there is often significant trait variation among…
In the last years, a remarkable theoretical effort has been made in order to understand stability and complexity in ecological communities. The non-random structures of real ecological interaction networks has been recognized as one key…
Metapopulation models have been instrumental in demonstrating the ecological impact of landscape structure on the survival of a focal species in complex environments. However, extensions to multiple species with arbitrary dispersal networks…
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…
We propose a general model to study the interplay between spatial dispersal and environment spatiotemporal fluctuations in metapopulation dynamics. An ecological landscape of favorable patches is generated like a L\'{e}vy dust, which allows…
Models in evolutionary game theory traditionally assume symmetric interactions in homogeneous environments. Here, we consider populations evolving in a heterogeneous environment, which consists of patches of different qualities that are…
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…
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…
Mutualisms are key for structuring ecological communities, but they are sensitive to environmental change and fluctuations in population size. Consequently, how mutualisms achieve stability remains an open question in ecological theory.…
The formation of groups of interacting individuals improves performance and fitness in many decentralised systems, from micro-organisms to social insects, from robotic swarms to artificial intelligence algorithms. Often, group formation and…
The study of flocking in biological systems has identified conditions for self-organized collective behavior, inspiring the development of decentralized strategies to coordinate the dynamics of swarms of drones and other autonomous…
A central feature of complex systems is the relevance and entanglement of different levels of description. For instance, the dynamics of ecosystems can be alternatively described in terms of large ecological processes and classes of…
Complex systems with global interactions tend to be stable if interactions between components are sufficiently homogeneous. In biological systems, which often have small copy numbers and interactions mediated by diffusing agents, noise and…
Collective systems that self-organise to maximise the group's ability to collect and distribute information can be successful in environments with high spatial and temporal variation. Such organisations are abundant in nature, as sharing…
Network of nonlinear dynamical elements often show clustering of synchronization by chaotic instability. Relevance of the clustering to ecological, immune, neural, and cellular networks is discussed, with the emphasis of partially ordered…
Foraging is a widespread behavior, and being part of a group may bring several benefits compared to solitary foraging, such as collective pooling of information and reducing environmental uncertainty. Often theoretical models of collective…
The persistence of biodiversity of species is a challenging proposition in ecological communities in the face of Darwinian selection. The present article investigates beyond the pairwise competitive interactions and provides a novel…