Related papers: Coexistence via trophic cascade in plant-herbivore…
Dryland vegetation can survive water stress by forming spatial patterns but is often subjected to herbivory as an additional stress that puts it at risk of desertification. Understanding the mutual relationships between vegetation…
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…
Body size drives the energetic demands of organisms, constraining trophic interactions between species and playing a significant role in shaping the feasibility of species' populations in a community. On macroevolutionary timescales, these…
Plant-frugivore interactions play a central role for plant persistence and spatial distribution by promoting the long-range dispersal of seeds by frugivores. However, plant-frugivore interactions are increasingly being threatened by…
Ecosystems are commonly organized into trophic levels -- organisms that occupy the same level in a food chain (e.g., plants, herbivores, carnivores). A fundamental question in theoretical ecology is how the interplay between trophic…
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…
Terrestrial ecosystems are generally green and only a small part (<10%) of the plant matter is consumed by herbivores annually,but the reason has been unclear due to the lack of food web models for predicting the absolute herbivore biomass…
Coextinction models are useful to understand community robustness to species loss and resilience to disturbances. We simulated pollinator extinctions in pollination networks by using a hybrid model that combined a recently developed…
Ecological systems are complex dynamical systems. Modelling efforts on ecosystems' dynamical stability have revealed that population dynamics, being highly nonlinear, can be governed by complex fluctuations. Indeed, experimental and field…
Food-web perturbations stemming from climate change, overexploitation, invasive species, and habitat degradation often cause an initial loss of species that results in a cascade of secondary extinctions, posing considerable challenges to…
Ecological models traditionally explain stability and coexistence through pairwise interactions among species. These interactions can also involve groups of three or more species, higher-order interactions, which recent theory suggests can…
We develop a mathematical model of extinction and coexistence in a generic predator-prey ecosystem composed of two herbivores in asymmetrical competition and a hunter exerting a predatory pressure on both species. With the aim of…
Dry-land ecosystem has turned into a matter of grave concern, due to growing threat of land degradation and bioproductivity-loss. Self-organized vegetation patterns are a remarkable characteristic of these ecosystems; apart from being…
The distributions of species lifetimes and species in space are related, since species with good local survival chances have more time to colonize new habitats and species inhabiting large areas have higher chances to survive local…
We analyze the long term behavior of interacting populations which can be controlled through harvesting. The dynamics is assumed to be discrete in time and stochastic due to the effect of environmental fluctuations. We present extinction…
The complexity of an ecological community can be distilled into a network, where diverse interactions connect species in a web of dependencies. Species interact not only with each other but indirectly through environmental effects, however…
We propose a model of multispecies populations surviving on distributed resources. System dynamics are investigated under changes in abiotic factors such as the climate, as parameterized through environmental temperature. In particular, we…
Local coexistence of species in large ecosystems is traditionally explained within the broad framework of niche theory. However, its rationale hardly justifies rich biodiversity observed in nearly homogeneous environments. Here we consider…
Ecological systems comprise an astonishing diversity of species that cooperate or compete with each other forming complex mutual dependencies. The minimum requirements to maintain a large species diversity on long time scales are in general…
A three population system with a top predator population, i.e. the herbivores, and two prey populations, grass and trees, is considered to model the interaction of herbivores with natural resources. We apply the model for four natural…