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The foraging problem asks how a collective of particles with limited computational, communication and movement capabilities can autonomously compress around a food source and disperse when the food is depleted or shifted, which may occur at…
We analyze the movement of a starving forager on a one-dimensional periodic lattice, where each location contains one unit of food. As the forager lands on sites with food, it consumes the food, leaving the sites empty. If the forager lands…
An agent-based model of population dynamics is presented. The model has as its expected behaviour the population dynamics of the equation-based Webworld model, within which large communities of species can be grown on evolutionary time…
Which factors govern the evolution of mutation rates and emergence of species? Here, we address this question using a first principles model of life where population dynamics of asexual organisms is coupled to molecular properties and…
Foraging is a widespread behavior, and being part of a group may bring several benefits compared to solitary foraging, such as collective pooling of information and reducing environmental uncertainty. Often theoretical models of collective…
To survive in dynamic and uncertain environments, individuals must develop effective decision strategies that balance information gathering and decision commitment. Models of such strategies often prioritize either optimizing tangible…
The spatial segregation of species is fundamental to ecosystem formation and stability. Behavioural strategies may determine where species are located and how their interactions change the local environment arrangement. In response to…
Occupancy models are used in statistical ecology to estimate species dispersion. The two components of an occupancy model are the detection and occupancy probabilities, with the main interest being in the occupancy probabilities. We show…
Predicting species distributions using occupancy models accounting for imperfect detection is now commonplace in ecology. Recently, modelling spatial and temporal autocorrelation was proposed to alleviate the lack of replication in…
Two density-dependent branching processes are considered to model predator-prey populations. For both models, preys are considered to be the main food supply of predators. Moreover, in each generation the number of individuals of each…
Citizen science biodiversity data present great opportunities for ecology and conservation across vast spatial and temporal scales. However, the opportunistic nature of these data lacks the sampling structure required by modeling…
We propose a new active learning approach for efficiently estimating the geographic range of a species from a limited number of on the ground observations. We model the range of an unmapped species of interest as the weighted combination of…
Efficient search acts as a strong selective force in biological systems ranging from cellular populations to predator-prey systems. The search processes commonly involve finding a stationary or mobile target within a heterogeneously…
A two-type two-sex branching process is introduced with the aim of describing the interaction of predator and prey populations with sexual reproduction and promiscuous mating. In each generation and in each species the total number of…
A prey animal surveying its environment must decide whether there is a dangerous predator present or not. If there is, it may flee. Flight has an associated cost, so the animal should not flee if there is no danger. However, the prey animal…
In evolutionary dynamics, the probability that a mutation spreads through the whole population, having arisen in a single individual, is known as the fixation probability. In general, it is not possible to find the fixation probability…
This paper presents Wanderer, a model of how autonomous adaptive systems coordinate internal biological needs with moment-by-moment assessments of the probabilities of events in the external world. The extent to which Wanderer moves about…
The question what determines the structure of natural food webs has been listed among the nine most important unanswered questions in ecology. It arises naturally from many problems related to ecosystem stability and resilience. The…
Computer modelling for evolutionary systems consists in: 1) to store in the memory the individual features of each member of a large population; and 2) to update the whole system repeatedly, as time goes by, according to some prescribed…
In any ecosystem, the conditions of the environment and the characteristics of the species that inhabit it are entangled, co-evolving in space and time. We introduce a model that couples active agents with a dynamic environment, interpreted…