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Interconnected ensembles of biological entities are perhaps some of the most complex systems that modern science has encountered so far. In particular, scientists have concentrated on understanding how the complexity of the interacting…
What do societies, the Internet, and the human brain have in common? They are all examples of complex relational systems, whose emerging behaviours are largely determined by the non-trivial networks of interactions among their constituents,…
Species interaction networks are a powerful tool for describing ecological communities; they typically contain nodes representing species, and edges representing interactions between those species. For the purposes of drawing abstract…
Relations among species in ecosystems can be represented by complex networks where both negative (competition) and positive (mutualism) interactions are concurrently present. Recently, it has been shown that many ecosystems can be cast into…
Over the last decade, significant progress has been made in understanding complex biological systems, however there have been few attempts at incorporating this knowledge into nature inspired optimization algorithms. In this paper, we…
We develop a set of equations to describe the population dynamics of many interacting species in food webs. Predator-prey interactions are non-linear, and are based on ratio-dependent functional responses. The equations account for…
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…
We consider a multi-species community modelled as a complex network of populations, where the links are given by a random asymmetric matrix J, with fraction 1-C of zero entries, where C reflects the over-all connectivity of the system. The…
Flocks of starlings exhibit a remarkable ability to maintain cohesion as a group in highly uncertain environments and with limited, noisy information. Recent work demonstrated that individual starlings within large flocks respond to a fixed…
Biological networks have evolved to be highly functional within uncertain environments while remaining extremely adaptable. One of the main contributors to the robustness and evolvability of biological networks is believed to be their…
Many complex systems in nature and society can be described in terms of networks capturing the intricate web of connections among the units they are made of. A key question is how to interpret the global organization of such networks as the…
Identifying the rank of species in a social or ecological network is a difficult task, since the rank of each species is invariably determined by complex interactions stipulated with other species. Simply put, the rank of a species is a…
Collective, especially group-based, managerial decision making is crucial in organizations. Using an evolutionary theoretic approach to collective decision making, agent-based simulations were conducted to investigate how human collective…
A recent problem in community ecology lies in defining structures behind matrices of species interactions. The interest in this area is to quantify the nestedness degree of the matrix after its maximal packing. In this work we evaluate…
The significant role of space in maintaining species coexistence and determining community structure and function is well established. However, community ecology studies have mainly focused on simple competition and predation systems, and…
Fuelled by a desire for greater connectivity, networked systems now pervade our society at an unprecedented level that will affect it in ways we do not yet understand. In contrast, nature has already developed efficient networks that can…
Patterns of nestedness and specialization asymmetry, where specialist species interact mainly with generalists while generalists interact with both generalists and specialists, are often observed in mutualistic and antagonistic bi-partite…
Recent studies uncovered important core/periphery network structures characterizing complex sets of cooperative and competitive interactions between network nodes, be they proteins, cells, species or humans. Better characterization of the…
The assembly of ecological communities from a pool of species is central to ecology, but the effect of this process on properties of community interaction networks is still largely unknown. Here, we use a systematic analytical framework to…
Individuals of different types, may it be genetic, cultural, or else, with different levels of fitness often compete for reproduction and survival. A fitter type generally has higher chances of disseminating their copies to other…