Related papers: Coarse-Graining Cascades Within Food Webs
For years, a main focus of ecological research has been to better understand the complex dynamical interactions between species which comprise food webs. Using the connectance properties of a widely explored synthetic food web called the…
Empirical observations show that ecological communities can have a huge number of coexisting species, also with few or limited number of resources. These ecosystems are characterized by multiple type of interactions, in particular…
Empirical observations show that ecological communities can have a huge number of coexisting species, also with few or limited number of resources. These ecosystems are characterized by multiple type of interactions, in particular…
An important challenge in theoretical ecology is to find good, coarse-grained representations of complex food webs. Here we use the approach of generalized modeling to show that it may be possible to formulate a coarse-graining algorithm…
We present novel analytical results about ecosystem species diversity that stem from a proposed coarse grained neutral model based on birth-death processes. The relevance of the problem lies in the urgency for understanding and synthesizing…
This is the second of two papers dedicated to the relationship between population models of competition and biodiversity. Here we consider species assembly models where the population dynamics is kept far from fixed points through the…
In the analysis of complex ecosystems it is common to use random interaction coefficients, often assumed to be such that all species are statistically equivalent. In this work we relax this assumption by choosing interactions according to…
Population structure induced by both spatial embedding and more general networks of interaction, such as model social networks, have been shown to have a fundamental effect on the dynamics and outcome of evolutionary games. These effects…
Recently we have introduced a simplified model of ecosystem assembly (Capitan et al., 2009) for which we are able to map out all assembly pathways generated by external invasions in an exact manner. In this paper we provide a deeper…
We explore a systematic approach to studying the dynamics of evolving networks at a coarse-grained, system level. We emphasize the importance of finding good observables (network properties) in terms of which coarse grained models can be…
In this work we analyse the topological and dynamical properties of a simple model of complex food webs, namely the niche model. In order to underline competition among species, we introduce "prey" and "predators" weighted overlap graphs…
Food webs are networks describing who is eating whom in an ecological community. By now it is clear that many aspects of food-web structure are reproducible across diverse habitats, yet little is known about the driving force behind this…
Does an ecological community allow stable coexistence? Identifying the general principles that determine the answer to this question is a central problem of theoretical ecology. Random matrix theory approaches have uncovered the general…
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…
Character evolution that affects ecological community interactions often occurs contemporaneously with temporal changes in population size, potentially altering the very nature of those dynamics. Such eco-evolutionary processes may be most…
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…
Ecological systems show a variety of characteristic patterns of biodiversity in space and time. It is a challenge for theory to find models that can reproduce and explain the observed patterns. Since the advent of island biogeography these…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a biological population affects which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations is difficult. Precise results have been…
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…
We develop a set of equations to describe the population dynamics of many interacting species in food webs. Predator-prey interactions are non-linear, and are based on ratio-dependent functional responses. The equations account for…