Related papers: Ecosystem transformations in response to environme…
Populations of replicating entities frequently experience sudden or cyclical changes in environment. We explore the implications of this phenomenon via a environmental switching parameter in several common evolutionary dynamics models…
Scaling laws in ecology, intended both as functional relationships among ecologically-relevant quantities and the probability distributions that characterize their occurrence, have long attracted the interest of empiricists and…
The statistical properties of an ecosystem composed of species interacting via pairwise, random interactions and deterministic, concentration limiting self-interaction are studied analytically with tools of equilibrium statistical mechanics…
We are living in an uncertain and dynamically changing world, where optimal decision-making under uncertainty is directly linked to the survival of species. However, evolutionary selection pressures that shape value-based decision-making…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
We introduce a new model for large scale evolution and extinction in which species are organized into food chains. The system evolves by two processes: origination/speciation and extinction. In the model, extinction of a given species can…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
In complex ecosystems such as microbial communities, there is constant ecological and evolutionary feedback between the residing species and the environment occurring on concurrent timescales. Species respond and adapt to their surroundings…
Global environmental change is affecting species distribution and their interactions with other species. In particular, the main drivers of environmental change strongly affect the strength of interspecific interactions with considerable…
Ecologists have put forward many explanations for coexistence, but these are only partial explanations; nature is complex, so it is reasonable to assume that in any given ecological community, multiple mechanisms of coexistence are…
Microbial communities routinely have several possible species compositions or community states observed for the same environmental parameters. Changes in these parameters can trigger abrupt and persistent transitions (regime shifts) between…
The far-reaching consequences of ecological interactions in the dynamics of biological communities remain an intriguing subject. For decades, competition has been a cornerstone in ecological processes, but mounting evidence shows that…
Species interactions (ranging from direct predator prey relationships to indirect effects mediated by the environment) are central to ecosystem balance and biodiversity. While empirical methods for measuring these interactions exist, their…
A challenge in global change biology is to predict how species will respond to future environmental change and to manage these responses. To make such predictions and management actions robust to novel futures, we need to accurately…
We study the stochastic evolution of four species in cyclic competition in a well mixed environment. In systems composed of a finite number $N$ of particles these simple interaction rules result in a rich variety of extinction scenarios,…
We develop a landscape-flux framework to investigate observed frequency distributions of vegetation and the stability of these ecological systems under fluctuations. The frequency distributions can characterize the population-potential…
From 08-12 August, 2022, 32 individuals participated in a workshop, Stability and Fluctuations in Complex Ecological Systems, at the Lorentz Center, located in Leiden, The Netherlands. An interdisciplinary dialogue between ecologists,…
We present a model for evolution and extinction in large ecosystems. The model incorporates the effects of interactions between species and the influences of abiotic environmental factors. We study the properties of the model by approximate…
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…
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.…