Related papers: Reconstructing ecological community dynamics from …
The internal behaviour of a population is an important feature to take account of when modelling their dynamics. In line with kin selection theory, many social species tend to cluster into distinct groups in order to enhance their overall…
When making predictions about ecosystems, we often have available a number of different ecosystem models that attempt to represent their dynamics in a detailed mechanistic way. Each of these can be used as simulators of large-scale…
Microbial ecosystems exhibit a surprising amount of functionally relevant diversity at all levels of taxonomic resolution, presenting a significant challenge for most modeling frameworks. A long-standing hope of theoretical ecology is that…
On a global level, ecological communities are being perturbed at an unprecedented rate by human activities and environmental instabilities. Yet, we understand little about what factors facilitate or impede long-term persistence of these…
Mays celebrated theoretical work of the 70s contradicted the established paradigm by demonstrating that complexity leads to instability in biological systems. Here Mays random-matrix modelling approach is generalized to realistic…
Theoretical studies have shown that stochasticity can affect the dynamics of ecosystems in counter-intuitive ways. However, without knowing the equations governing the dynamics of populations or ecosystems, it is difficult to ascertain the…
Classical approaches to ecological stability rely on fully connected interaction models, yet real ecosystems are sparse and structured--a feature that qualitatively reshapes their collective dynamics. Here, we establish a thermodynamically…
In ecology, climate and other fields, (sub)systems have been identified that can transition into a qualitatively different state when a critical threshold or tipping point in a driving process is crossed. An understanding of those tipping…
The composition of ecological communities varies not only between different locations but also in time. Understanding the fundamental processes that drive species towards rarity or abundance is crucial to assessing ecosystem resilience and…
Social tipping points are promising levers to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emission targets. They describe how social, political, economic or technological systems can move rapidly into a new state if cascading positive feedback…
Model uncertainty and limited data are fundamental challenges to robust management of human intervention in a natural system. These challenges are acutely highlighted by concerns that many ecological systems may contain tipping points, such…
Bayesian inference methods are applied within a Bayesian hierarchical modelling framework to the problems of joint state and parameter estimation, and of state forecasting. We explore and demonstrate the ideas in the context of a simple…
How do networks of relationships evolve over time? We analyse a dataset tracking the social interactions of 900 individuals over four years. Despite continuous shifts in individual relationships, the macroscopic structural properties of the…
Multistability is a phenomenon prevalent in many natural systems. In climate, for example, it allows the possibility of irreversible consequences on planetary scale as a result of climate change. Indeed, a climate ``tipping element'' is a…
Multiple stable states - the coexistence of two or more distinct ecological configurations under identical environmental conditions - have attracted sustained interest in ecology, yet the field still lacks a unified framework connecting…
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…
Microbial ecosystems are commonly modeled by fixed interactions between species in steady exponential growth states. However, microbes often modify their environments so strongly that they are forced out of the exponential state into…
May (1974,1976) opened the debate on whether biological populations might exhibit nonlinear dynamics and chaos. However, it has in general been difficult to verify nonlinear dynamics in biological populations. There are many reports…
With the growing number of discovered exoplanets, the Gaia concept finds its second wind. The Gaia concept defines that the biosphere of an inhabited planet regulates a planetary climate through feedback loops such that the planet remains…
Over the past century, nonlinear difference and differential equations have been used to understand conditions for species coexistence. However, these models fail to account for random fluctuations due to demographic and environmental…