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The notion of (auto) catalytic networks has become a cornerstone in understanding the possibility of a sudden dramatic increase of diversity in biological evolution as well as in the evolution of social and economical systems. Here we study…
We incorporate the generic hierarchical architecture of foodwebs into a "{\it unified}" model that describes both "micro" and "macro" evolutions within a single theoretical framework. This model describes the "micro" -evolution in detail by…
Food webs have been found to exhibit remarkable motif profiles, patterns in the relative prevalences of all possible three-species sub-graphs, and this has been related to ecosystem properties such as stability and robustness. Analysing 46…
Evolutionary dynamics is often viewed as a subtle process of change accumulation that causes a divergence among organisms and their genomes. However, this interpretation is an inheritance of a gradualistic view that has been challenged at…
Populations of species in ecosystems are often constrained by availability of resources within their environment. In effect this means that a growth of one population, needs to be balanced by comparable reduction in populations of others.…
Percolation processes on random networks have been the subject of intense research activity over the last decades: the overall phenomenology of standard percolation on uncorrelated and unclustered topologies is well known. Still some…
Cross-diffusion systems play a central role in mathematical modelling, in which density-dependent dispersal and multiscale mechanisms can lead to spatial segregation and diffusion-driven instabilities. In several relevant examples,…
Joint species distribution models are popular in ecology for modeling covariate effects on species occurrence, while characterizing cross-species dependence. Data consist of multivariate binary indicators of the occurrences of different…
Bacteriophages are central to microbial ecosystems for balancing bacterial populations and promoting evolution by applying strong selection pressure. Here we review some of the known aspects that modulate phage-bacteria interaction in a way…
Experimental studies of microbial communities routinely reveal that they have multiple stable states. While each of these states is generally resilient, certain perturbations such as antibiotics, probiotics and diet shifts, result in…
We explain how hierarchical organization of biological systems emerges naturally during evolution, through a transition in the units of individuality. We will show how these transitions are the result of competing selective forces operating…
The observed architecture of ecological and socio-economic networks differs significantly from that of random networks. From a network science standpoint, non-random structural patterns observed in real networks call for an explanation of…
We identify the phase of a cycle as a new critical factor for tipping points (critical transitions) in cyclic systems subject to time-varying external conditions. As an example, we consider how contemporary climate variability induces…
At the point of a second order phase transition also termed as a critical point, systems display long range order and their macroscopic behaviors are independent of the microscopic details making up the system. Due to these properties, it…
Ecosystems tend to fluctuate around stable equilibria in response to internal dynamics and environmental factors. Occasionally, they enter an unstable tipping region and collapse into an alternative stable state. Our understanding of how…
A detailed analysis of three species-rich ecosystem food webs has shown that they display scale-free distributions of connections. Such graphs of interaction are in fact shared by a number of biological and technological networks, which…
The human habitat is a host where microbial species evolve, function, and continue to evolve. Elucidating how microbial communities respond to human habitats is a fundamental and critical task, as establishing baselines of human microbiome…
Natural ecosystems are characterized by striking diversity of form and functions and yet exhibit deep symmetries emerging across scales of space, time and organizational complexity. Species-area relationships and species-abundance…
Food web topology and energy flow rates across food web linkages can influence ecosystem properties such as stability. Stability predictions from current models of energy flow are often sensitive to details in their formulation, and their…
Microbes are often discussed in terms of dichotomies such as copiotrophic/oligotrophic and fast/slow-growing microbes, defined using the characterisation of microbial growth in isolated cultures. The dichotomies are usually qualitative…