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We explore the connection between migration patterns and emergent behaviors of evolving populations in spatially heterogeneous environments. Despite extensive studies in ecologically and medically important systems, a unifying framework…
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…
Dissipative phenomena manifest in multiple mechanical systems. In this dissertation, different geometric frameworks for modelling non-conservative dynamics are considered. The objective is to generalize several results from conservative…
The population dynamics and stability of ecosystems of interacting species is studied from the perspective of non-equilibrium thermodynamics by assuming that species, through their biotic and abiotic interactions, are units of entropy…
We investigate global stability and dynamics of large ecological networks by classical methods of the dynamical system theory, including Hamiltonian methods, and averaging. Our analysis exploits the network topological structure, namely,…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism 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…
Transformations to create more sustainable social-ecological systems are urgently needed. Structural change is a feature of transformations of social-ecological systems that is of critical importance but is little understood. Here, we…
All biological systems are subject to perturbations: due to thermal fluctuations, external environments, or mutations. Yet, while biological systems are composed of thousands of interacting components, recent high-throughput experiments…
We introduce and solve a general model of dynamic response under external perturbations. This model captures a wide range of systems out of equilibrium including Ising models of physical systems, social opinions, and population genetics.…
This paper introduces a novel approach to quantifying ecological resilience in biological systems, particularly focusing on noisy systems responding to episodic disturbances with sudden adaptations. Incorporating concepts from…
Ecological communities are composed of species interactions that respond to environmental fluctuations. Despite increasing evidence of temporal variation in these interactions, most theoretical frameworks remain rooted in static…
Eco-evolutionary frameworks can explain certain features of communities in which ecological and evolutionary processes occur over comparable timescales. Here, we investigate whether an evolutionary dynamics may interact with the spatial…
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…
Preserving biodiversity and ecosystem stability is a challenge that can be pursued through modern statistical mechanics modeling. Here we introduce a variational maximum entropy-based algorithm to evaluate the entropy in a minimal ecosystem…
We discuss the relevance of studying ecology within the framework of Complexity Science from a statistical mechanics approach. Ecology is concerned with understanding how systems level properties emerge out of the multitude of interactions…
How do interactions between species influence their spatial distribution in an ecosystem? To answer this question, we introduce a spatially-extended ecosystem of Generalized Lotka-Volterra type, where species can diffuse and interactions…
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…
Spatial extent is a complicating factor in mathematical biology. The possibility that an action at point A cannot immediately affect what happens at point B creates the opportunity for spatial nonuniformity. This nonuniformity must change…
Food-web perturbations stemming from climate change, overexploitation, invasive species, and habitat degradation often cause an initial loss of species that results in a cascade of secondary extinctions, posing considerable challenges to…