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The biological requirements for an ecosystem to develop and maintain species diversity are in general unknown. Here we consider a model ecosystem of sessile and mutually excluding organisms competing for space [Mathiesen et al. Phys. Rev.…
Microorganisms live in environments that inevitably fluctuate between mild and harsh conditions. As harsh conditions may cause extinctions, the rate at which fluctuations occur can shape microbial communities and their diversity, but we…
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…
Indirect effects are powerful influences in ecosystems that may maintain species diversity and alter apparent relationships between species in surprising ways. Here, we applied Network Environ Analysis to 50 empirically-based trophic…
In this paper we consider a three level food web subject to a disease affecting the bottom prey. The resulting dynamics is much richer with respect to the purely demographic model, in that it contains more transcritical bifurcations, gluing…
The rise in the availability of bacterial genomes defines a need for synthesis: abstracting from individual taxa, to see larger patterns of bacterial lifestyles across systems. A key concept for such synthesis in ecology is the niche, the…
Mutualistic networks are formed when the interactions between two classes of species are mutually beneficial. They are important examples of cooperation shaped by evolution. Mutualism between animals and plants plays a key role in the…
Statistical averaging and asynchronous population dynamics as portfolio mechanisms are considered as the most important processes with which biodiversity contributes to ecosystem stability. However, portfolio theories usually regard…
Microbes require several complex organic molecules for growth. A species may obtain a required factor by taking up molecules released by other species or by synthesizing the molecule. The patterns of uptake and synthesis set a flow of…
A cross-diffusion system modeling the information herding of individuals is analyzed in a bounded domain with no-flux boundary conditions. The variables are the species' density and an influence function which modifies the information state…
We discuss tipping phenomena (critical transitions) in nonautonomous systems using an example of a bistable ecosystem model with environmental changes represented by time-varying parameters [Scheffer et al., Ecosystems, 11 (2008), pp.…
We have generalized our ``unified'' model of evolutionary ecology by taking into account the possible movements of the organisms from one ``patch'' to another within the same eco-system. We model the spatial extension of the eco-system…
Socio-diversity, the variety of human opinions, ideas, behaviors and styles, has profound implications for social systems. While it fuels innovation, productivity, and collective intelligence, it can also complicate communication and erode…
There is a pressing need to better understand how microbial populations respond to antimicrobial drugs, and to find mechanisms to possibly eradicate antimicrobial-resistant cells. The inactivation of antimicrobials by resistant microbes can…
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…
Large-scale structural patterns commonly occur in network models of complex systems including a skewed node degree distribution and small-world topology. These patterns suggest common organizational constraints and similar functional…
Microbial communities are diverse biological systems that include taxa from across multiple kingdoms of life. Notably, interactions between bacteria and fungi play a significant role in determining community structure. However, these…
The species-area relationship is one of the central generalizations in ecology however its origin has remained a puzzle. Since ecosystems are understood as energy transduction systems, the regularities in species richness are considered to…
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 recent discovery of universal principles underlying many complex networks occurring across a wide range of length scales in the biological world has spurred physicists in trying to understand such features using techniques from…