Related papers: Ecology, Spatial Structure, and Selection Pressure…
Phylogenetic networks represent evolutionary history of species and can record natural reticulate evolutionary processes such as horizontal gene transfer and gene recombination. This makes phylogenetic networks a more comprehensive…
Both evolution and ecology have long been concerned with the impact of variable environmental conditions on observed levels of genetic diversity within and between species. We model the evolution of a quantitative trait under selection that…
While the use of spatial agent-based and individual-based models has flourished across many scientific disciplines, the complexities these models generate are often difficult to manage and quantify. This research reduces population-driven,…
The main topic of this thesis is the analysis of evolution equations reflecting issues in ecology and population dynamics. In mathematical modelling, the impact of environmental elements and the interaction between species is read into the…
The sustainable management of common resources often leads to a social dilemma known as the tragedy of the commons: individuals benefit from rapid extraction of resources, while communities as a whole benefit from more sustainable…
Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…
Biological phenotypes are products of complex evolutionary processes in which selective forces influence multiple biological trait measurements in unknown ways. Phylogenetic factor analysis disentangles these relationships across the…
Non-uniform rates of morphological evolution and evolutionary increases in organismal complexity, captured in metaphors like "adaptive zones", "punctuated equilibrium" and "blunderbuss patterns", require more elaborate explanations than a…
Emergence of new protein structures has proved difficult to trace in nature and engineer in the laboratory. However, one aspect of structure evolution has proved immensely helpful for determining the three-dimensional structure of proteins…
Genetic information and environmental factors determine the path of an individuals life and therefore, the evolution of its entire species. We have succeeded in proposing and studying a model that captures this idea. In our model, a…
Phylogenetic reconstruction aims at finding plausible hypotheses of the evolutionary history of genes or species based on genomic sequence information. The distinction of orthologous genes (genes that having a common ancestry and diverged…
One of the properties that make ecological systems so unique is the range of complex behavioural patterns that can be exhibited by even the simplest communities with only a few species. Much of this complexity is commonly attributed to…
Metapopulation models have been instrumental in demonstrating the ecological impact of landscape structure on the survival of a focal species in complex environments. However, extensions to multiple species with arbitrary dispersal networks…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
We study macroevolutionary dynamics by extending microevolutionary competition models to long time scales. It has been shown that for a general class of competition models, gradual evolutionary change in continuous phenotypes (evolutionary…
The theory of alternative stable states and tipping points has garnered substantial attention in the last several decades. It predicts potential critical transitions from one ecosystem state to a completely different state under increasing…
Genetic programming and artificial life systems commonly employ tag-matching schemes to determine interactions between model components. However, the implications of criteria used to determine affinity between tags with respect to…
The effect of phenotypic plasticity on evolution, the so-called Baldwin effect, has been studied extensively for more than 100 years. Plasticity is known to influence the speed of evolution towards a specific genetic configuration, but…
Spatial structure and species interactions jointly shape the dynamics and biodiversity of ecological systems, yet most theoretical models either neglect spatial heterogeneity or sacrifice analytical tractability. Here, we provide a unified…
In epistatic fitness landscapes, the fitness effect of a mutation depends on the genetic background and may even switch between deleterious and beneficial depending on the presence of another mutation. Epistatic interactions may cause both…