Related papers: Interaction networks in persistent Lotka-Volterra …
Quantifying interaction strength between species is of interest in food web studies for understanding population dynamics. Theory has run ahead of experiment in solving equations describing ecological systems (the Lotka-Volterra equations,…
It has been a century since the species-area relationship (SAR) was first proposed as a power law to explain how species richness scales with area. There have been many attempts to explain the origin of this predominant form. Apart from the…
Understanding under what conditions interacting populations, whether they be plants, animals, or viral particles, coexist is a question of theoretical and practical importance in population biology. Both biotic interactions and…
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…
Ecologists have long suspected that species are more likely to interact if their traits match in a particular way. For example, a pollination interaction may be more likely if the proportions of a bee's tongue fit a plant's flower shape.…
Microbial communities harbor extensive fine-scale diversity: closely-related strains of the same species coexist alongside many distantly-related taxa. Yet strain coexistence remains poorly understood, largely because most studies neglect…
We simulate the prisoner's dilemma and hawk-dove games on a real social acquaintance network. Using a discrete analogue of replicator dynamics, we show that surprisingly high levels of cooperation can be achieved, contrary to what happens…
Many real systems are strongly characterized by collective cooperative phenomena whose existence and properties still need a satisfactory explanation. Coherently with their collective nature, they call for new and more accurate descriptions…
We investigate a class of models for opinion dynamics in a population with two interacting families of individuals. Each family has an intrinsic mean field "Voter-like" dynamics which is influenced by interaction with the other family. The…
Lotka Volterra model and its modified forms have long become a major area of interest for periodic motions in nonlinear systems with competitive species. The model given by Volterra shows that its periodicity is dependent on initial…
The majority of analysis of interacting systems is done for weak and well-balanced interactions, when in fact topology and rare event factors often result in strong and sign-biased interactions when considering real systems. We analyse the…
Understanding how the structure of community interactions is modified by coevolution is vital for understanding system responses to change at all scales. However, in absence of a group selection process, collective community behaviours…
Niche and neutral theory are two prevailing, yet much debated, ideas in ecology proposed to explain the patterns of biodiversity. Whereas niche theory emphasizes selective differences between species and interspecific interactions in…
Forty years ago, Robert May questioned a central belief in ecology by proving that sufficiently large or complex ecological networks have probability of persisting close to zero. To prove this point, he analyzed large networks in which…
In spite of its relevance to the origin of complex networks, the interplay between form and function and its role during network formation remains largely unexplored. While recent studies introduce dynamics by considering rewiring processes…
We study the evolutionary Prisoner's Dilemma on two social networks obtained from actual relational data. We find very different cooperation levels on each of them that can not be easily understood in terms of global statistical properties…
Non-transitive dominance and the resulting cyclic loop of three or more competing species provide a fundamental mechanism to explain biodiversity in biological and ecological systems. Both Lotka-Volterra and May-Leonard type model…
The foundational concepts behind the persistence of ecological communities have been based on two ecological properties: dynamical stability and feasibility. The former is typically regarded as the capacity of a community to return to an…
Systems of interacting species, such as biological environments or chemical reactions, are often described mathematically by sets of coupled ordinary differential equations. While a large number $\beta$ of species may be involved in the…
The networks of predator-prey interactions in ecological systems are remarkably complex, but nevertheless surprisingly stable in terms of long term persistence of the system as a whole. In order to understand the mechanism driving the…