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Regular vegetation patterns in semiarid ecosystems are believed to arise from the interplay between long-range competition and facilitation processes acting at smaller distances. We show that, under rather general conditions, long-range…
Mays celebrated theoretical work of the 70s contradicted the established paradigm by demonstrating that complexity leads to instability in biological systems. Here Mays random-matrix modelling approach is generalized to realistic…
Competition indices are models frequently used in ecology to account for the impact of density and resource distribution on the growth of a plant population. They allow to define simple individual-based models, by integrating information…
Vegetation in semi-arid ecosystems frequently organizes into spatially heterogeneous mosaics that regulate ecosystem functioning, productivity, and resilience. These patterns arise from local biological interactions, including facilitation…
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…
Ecosystems display a complex spatial organization. Ecologists have long tried to characterize them by looking at how different measures of biodiversity change across spatial scales. Ecological neutral theory has provided simple predictions…
Natural ecosystems are characterized by striking diversity of form and functions and yet exhibit deep symmetries emerging across scales of space, time and organizational complexity. Species-area relationships and species-abundance…
Pathogen transmission and virulence are main evolutionary variables broadly assumed to be linked through trade-offs. In well-mixed populations, these trade-offs are often ascribed to physiological restrictions, while populations with…
Structure, composition and stability of ecological populations are shaped by the inter- and intra-species interactions within these communities. It remains to be fully understood how the interplay of these interactions with other factors,…
The introduction of non-native organisms into complex microbiome communities holds enormous potential to benefit society. However, microbiome engineering faces several challenges including successful establishment of the organism into the…
Spatial ecological networks are widely used to model interactions between georeferenced biological entities (e.g., populations or communities). The analysis of such data often leads to a two-step approach where groups containing similar…
A metapopulation structure in landscape ecology comprises a group of interacting spatially separated subpopulations or patches of the same species that may experience several local extinctions. This makes the investigation of survivability…
What determines biodiversity in nature is a prominent issue in ecology, especially in biotic resource systems that are typically devoid of cross-feeding. Here, we show that by incorporating pairwise encounters among consumer individuals…
Patches of vegetation consist of dense clusters of shrubs, grass, or trees, often found to be circular characteristic size, defined by the properties of the vegetation and terrain. Therefore, vegetation patches can be interpreted as…
Rapidly mutating pathogens may be able to persist in the population and reach an endemic equilibrium by escaping hosts' acquired immunity. For such diseases, multiple biological, environmental and population-level mechanisms determine the…
Spatial pattern formation is a key feature of many natural systems in physics, chemistry and biology. The essential theoretical issue in understanding pattern formation is to explain how a spatially homogeneous initial state can undergo…
Understanding how biological constraints shape neural computation is a central goal of computational neuroscience. Spatially embedded recurrent neural networks provide a promising avenue to study how modelled constraints shape the combined…
We analyze a spatially extended version of a well-known model of forest-savanna dynamics, which presents as a system of nonlinear partial integro-differential equations, and study necessary conditions for pattern-forming bifurcations.…
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…
We study an individual-based model in which two spatially-distributed species, characterized by different diffusivities, compete for resources. We consider three different ecological settings. In the first, diffusing faster has a cost in…