Related papers: Modelling Soil as a Living System: Feedback betwee…
Employing an effective cellular automata model, we investigate and analyze the build-up and erosion of soil. Depending on the strategy employed for handling agricultural production, in many cases we find a critical dependence on the…
Patterns in a semiarid ecosystem are important because they directly and indirectly affect ecological processes, biodiversity, and ecosystem resilience. Understanding the causes and effects of these patterns is critical for long-term land…
The spatial structure of the cell is highly organized at all levels: from small complexes and assemblies, to local nano- and micro-clusters, to global, micrometer scales across and between cells. We suggest that this multiscale spatial cell…
The savanna biome is characterised by a continuous vegetation cover, comprised of herbaceous and woody plants. The coexistence of species in arid savannas, where water availability is the main limiting resource for plant growth, provides an…
The ubiquitous existence of microbial communities marks the importance of understanding how species interact within the community to coexist and their spatial organization. We study a two-species mutualistic cross-feeding model through a…
Spatial self-organization emerges in distributed systems exhibiting local interactions when nonlinearities and the appropriate propagation of signals are at work. These kinds of phenomena can be modeled with different frameworks, typically…
Soil microbial communities are known to be robust against perturbations such as nutrition inputs, which appears as an obstacle for the soil improvement. On the other hand, its adaptable aspect has been also reported. Here we propose simple…
Bacteria possess diverse mechanisms to regulate their motility in response to environmental and physiological signals, enabling them to navigate complex habitats and adapt their behavior. Among these mechanisms, interspecies recognition…
A multispecies artificial ecosystem is formulated using cellular automata with species interactions and food chain hierarchy. The constructed finite state automaton can simulate the complexity and self-organized characteristics of the…
Dormancy is an essential strategy for microorganisms to cope with environmental stress. However, global ecosystem models typically ignore microbial dormancy, resulting in major model uncertainties. To facilitate the consideration of…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
We present a stochastic approach to modeling the dynamics of coexistence of prey and predator populations. It is assumed that the space of coexistence is explicitly subdivided in a grid of cells. Each cell can be occupied by only one…
We introduce a model of traveling agents ({\it e.g.} frugivorous animals) who feed on randomly located vegetation patches and disperse their seeds, thus modifying the spatial distribution of resources in the long term. It is assumed that…
Plant-soil feedback is recognized as a causal mechanism for the emergence of vegetation patterns of the same species especially when water is not a limiting resource (e.g. humid environments). Nevertheless, in the field, plants rarely grow…
In this paper I describe a cellular automaton model of a multi-species ecosystem, suitable for the study of emergent properties of macroevolution. Unlike majority of ecological models, the number of coexisting species is not fixed. Starting…
One of the central themes in modern ecology is the enduring debate on whether there is a relationship between the complexity of a biological community and its stability. In this paper, we focus on the role of detritus and spatial dispersion…
In order to understand the role of space in ecological communities where each species produces a certain type of resource and has varying abilities to exploit the resources produced by its own species and by the other species, we carry out…
Bacteria frequently colonize natural microcavities such as gut crypts, plant apoplasts, and soil pores. Recent studies have shown that the physical structure of these spaces plays a crucial role in shaping the stability and resilience of…
A mutualism is an interaction where the involved species benefit from each other. We study a two-dimensional hexagonal three-state cellular automaton model of a two-species mutualistic system. The simple model is characterized by four…
Coupled natural systems are generally modeled at multiple abstraction levels. Both structural scale and behavioral complexity of these models are determinants in the kinds of questions that can be posed and answered. As scale and complexity…