Related papers: Ecology, Spatial Structure, and Selection Pressure…
Random walks on multidimensional nonlinear landscapes are of interest in many areas of science and engineering. In particular, properties of adaptive trajectories on fitness landscapes determine population fates and thus play a central role…
Search for possible relationships between phylogeny and ontogeny is one of the most important issues in the field of evolutionary developmental biology. By representing developmental dynamics of spatially located cells with gene expression…
Macroevolution is considered as a problem of stochastic dynamics in a system with many competing agents. Evolutionary events (speciations and extinctions) are triggered by fitness records found by random exploration of the agents' fitness…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
Understanding the influence of an environment on the evolution of its resident population is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. Great progress has been made in homogeneous population structures while heterogeneous structures have…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…
Understanding of the evolutionary origins of protein structures represents a key component of the understanding of molecular evolution as a whole. Here we seek to elucidate how the features of an underlying protein structural "space" might…
One of the classical questions in evolutionary biology is how evolutionary processes are coupled at the gene and species level. With this motivation, we compare the topological properties (mainly the depth scaling, as a characterization of…
Mathematical modelling of the evolution of the size-spectrum dynamics in aquatic ecosystems was discovered to be a powerful tool to have a deeper insight into impacts of human- and environmental driven changes on the marine ecosystem. In…
We investigate how the pattern of contacts between species in mutualistic ecosystems is affected by the phylogenetic proximity between the species of each guild. We develop a dynamical model geared to establish the role of such proximity in…
Phylogenetics is a widely used concept in evolutionary biology. It is the reconstruction of evolutionary history by building trees that represent branching patterns and sequences. These trees represent shared history, and it is our…
Fixed tree topologies are widely used in phylodynamic analyses to reduce computational burden, yet the consequences of this assumption remain insufficiently understood. Here, we systematically assess the impact of various fixed-topology…
Climate changes may affect ecosystems destabilising relationships among species. We investigate the spatial rock-paper-scissors models with a regional unevenness that reduces the selection capacity of organisms of one species. Our results…
Ecological systems are emergent features of ecological and adaptive dynamics of a community of interacting species. By natural selection through the abiotic environment and by co-adaptation within the community, species evolve, thereby…
Theoretical understanding of evolutionary dynamics in spatially structured populations often relies on non-spatial models. Biofilms are among such populations where a more accurate understanding is of theoretical interest and can reveal new…
1. Abrupt environmental changes can lead to evolutionary shifts in trait evolution. Identifying these shifts is an important step in understanding the evolutionary history of phenotypes. 2. We propose an ensemble variable selection method…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a biological population affects which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations is difficult. Precise results have been…
Ecology studies biodiversity in its variety and complexity. It describes how species distribute and perform in response to environmental changes. Ecological processes and structures are highly complex and adaptive. In order to quantify…
Understanding how species persist under interacting stressors is a central challenge in ecology. We develop a spatially explicit reaction-diffusion framework to investigate competing species in landscapes shaped by climate variability,…
The impact of environmental fluctuation on species diversity is studied with a model of the evolutionary ecology of microorganisms. We show that environmental fluctuation induces evolutionary branching and assures the consequential…