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At what level does selective pressure effectively act? When considering the reproductive dynamics of interacting and mutating agents, it has long been debated whether selection is better understood by focusing on the individual or if…
We develop a theory of generalist predation showing how alternative prey species are affected by changes in both mean abundance and variability (coefficient of variation) of their predator's primary prey. The theory is motivated by the…
We study a mechanistic mathematical model of extinction and coexistence in a generic hunter-prey ecosystem. The model represents typical scenarios of human invasion and environmental change, characteristic of the late Pleistocene,…
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…
According to the competitive exclusion principle, in a finite ecosystem, extinction occurs naturally when two or more species compete for the same resources. An important question that arises is: when coexistence is not possible, which…
Ecosystems are formed by networks of species and their interactions. Traditional models of such interactions assume a constant interaction strength between a given pair of species. However, there is often significant trait variation among…
We study the effect of speciation, i.e. the introduction of new species through evolution into communities, in the setting of predator-prey systems. Predator-prey dynamics is classically well modeled by Lotka-Volterra equations, also when…
When three species compete cyclically in a well-mixed, stochastic system of $N$ individuals, extinction is known to typically occur at times scaling as the system size $N$. This happens, for example, in rock-paper-scissors games or…
We develop a theoretical framework to understand the persistence and coexistence of competitive species in a spatially explicit metacommunity model with a heterogeneous dispersal kernel. Our analysis, based on methods from the physics of…
A new model ecosystem consisting of many interacting species is introduced. The species are connected through a random matrix with a given connectivity. It is shown that the system is organized close to a boundary of marginal stability in…
Species extinction is a core process that affects the diversity of life on Earth. Competition between species in a population is considered by ecological niche-based theories as a key factor leading to different severity of species…
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…
A model of the dynamics of natural rotifer populations is described as a discrete nonlinear map depending on three parameters, which reflect characteristics of the population and environment. Model dynamics and their change by variation of…
Theoretical models show that in a non-constant environment two predator species feeding on one and the same prey may coexist because the two species occupy different temporal niches: the one with the longer handling time has the advantage…
In order to model real ecological systems one has to consider many species that interact in complex ways. However, most of the recent theoretical studies have been restricted to few species systems with rather trivial interactions. The few…
What determines species diversity is dramatic concern in science. Here we report the effect of doping on diversity in spatiotemporal rock-paper-scissors (RPS) games, which can be observed directly in ecological, biological and social…
The maintenance of diversity, the `commonness of rarity', and compositional turnover are ubiquitous features of species-rich communities. Through a minimal model, we consider how these features reflect the interplay between environmental…
Cyclic predator-prey systems have been shown to give rise to rich, and novel, space-time patterns, as for example coarsening domains with non-trivial in-domain dynamics. In this work we study numerically the responses of a cyclic…
We are concerned with the persistence of both predator and prey in a diffusive predator-prey system with a climate change effect, which is modeled by a spatial-temporal heterogeneity depending on a moving variable. Moreover, we consider…
Competitive birth-death processes often exhibit an oscillatory behavior. We investigate a particular case where the oscillation cycles are marginally stable on the mean-field level. An iconic example of such a system is the Lotka-Volterra…