Related papers: Bifurcations and multistability in empirical mutua…
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…
Highly-diverse ecosystems exhibit a broad distribution of population sizes and species turnover, where species at high and low abundances are exchanged over time. We show that these two features generically emerge in the fluctuating phase…
The spatio-temporal arrangement of interacting populations often influences the maintenance of species diversity and is a subject of intense research. Here, we study the spatio-temporal patterns arising from the cyclic competition between…
Explaining coexistence in species-rich communities of primary producers remains a challenge for ecologists because of their likely competition for shared resources. Following Hutchinson's seminal suggestion, many theoreticians have tried to…
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…
Ecosystems are formed by networks of species and their interactions. Traditional models of such interactions assume a constant interaction strength between a given pair of species. However, there is often significant trait variation among…
The dynamics of two competing species in a finite size community is one of the most studied problems in population genetics and community ecology. Stochastic fluctuations lead, inevitably, to the extinction of one of the species, but the…
Mutual interference and prey refuge are important drivers of predator-prey dynamics. The "exponent" or degree of mutual interference has been under much debate in theoretical ecology. In the present work, we investigate the interplay of the…
Explaining biodiversity is a fundamental issue in ecology. A long-standing puzzle lies in the paradox of the plankton: many species of plankton feeding on a limited variety of resources coexist, apparently flouting the competitive exclusion…
A central concern of community ecology is the interdependence between interaction strengths and the underlying structure of the network upon which species interact. In this work we present a solvable example of such a feedback mechanism in…
If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…
We analyze purely competitive many-species Lotka-Volterra systems with random interaction matrices, focusing the attention on statistical properties of their asymptotic states. Generic features of the evolution are outlined from a…
Mutualistic networks provide a powerful way to describe and analyse plant-pollinator communities and their structure over time. While these networks capture the complex interdependencies that link population fates across the season, they…
We introduce an individual-based model of a complex ecological community with random interactions. The model contains a large number of species, each with a finite population of individuals, subject to discrete reproduction and death…
This is the first of two papers where we discuss the limits imposed by competition to the biodiversity of species communities. In this first paper we study the coexistence of competing species at the fixed point of population dynamic…
The objective of this paper is to study the dynamical behaviour systematically of an ecological system with Beddington-DeAngelis functional response which avoids the criticism occurred in the case of ratio-dependent functional response at…
Microbial communities routinely have several possible species compositions or community states observed for the same environmental parameters. Changes in these parameters can trigger abrupt and persistent transitions (regime shifts) between…
The persistence of biodiversity of species is a challenging proposition in ecological communities in the face of Darwinian selection. The present article investigates beyond the pairwise competitive interactions and provides a novel…
A commonly used approach to study stability in a complex system is by analyzing the Jacobian matrix at an equilibrium point of a dynamical system. The equilibrium point is stable if all eigenvalues have negative real parts. Here, by…
Dynamical systems across the sciences, from electrical circuits to ecological networks, undergo qualitative and often catastrophic changes in behavior, called bifurcations, when their underlying parameters cross a threshold. Existing…