Related papers: Ecosystems as adaptive living circuits

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…

Ecosystems often undergo abrupt regime shifts in response to gradual external changes. These shifts are theoretically understood as a regime switch between alternative stable states of the ecosystem dynamical response to smooth changes in…

Continuous adaptation allows survival in an ever-changing world. Adjustments in the synaptic coupling strength between neurons are essential for this capability, setting us apart from simpler, hard-wired organisms. How these changes can be…

Mounting evidence indicates that our planet might experience runaway effects associated to rising temperatures and ecosystem overexploitation, leading to catastrophic shifts on short time scales. Remediation scenarios capable of…

Transport networks are crucial to the functioning of natural and technological systems. Nature features transport networks that are adaptive over a vast range of parameters, thus providing an impressive level of robustness in supply.…

Unstoppable feedback loops and tipping points in socio-ecological systems are the main threats to sustainability. These behaviors have been extensively studied, notably to predict, and arguably deviate, dead-end trajectories. Behind the…

Biological machines like molecular motors and enzymes operate in dynamic cycles representable as stochastic flows on networks. Current stochastic dynamics describes such flows on fixed networks. Here, we develop a scalable approach to…

Adaptivity is a dynamical feature that is omnipresent in nature, socio-economics, and technology. For example, adaptive couplings appear in various real-world systems like the power grid, social, and neural networks, and they form the…

It was hypothesized that the structures of biological transport networks are the result of either energy consumption or adaptation dynamics. Although approaches based on these hypotheses can produce optimal network and form loop structures,…

Complex systems can convert energy imparted by nonequilibrium forces to regulate how quickly they transition between long lived states. While such behavior is ubiquitous in natural and synthetic systems, currently there is no general…

Evolution in time-varying environments naturally leads to adaptable biological systems that can easily switch functionalities. Advances in the synthesis of environmentally-responsive materials therefore open up the possibility of creating a…

Transport networks are typically optimized, either by evolutionary pressures in biological systems or by human design in engineered structures. In the case of systems such as the animal vasculature, the transport of fluids is hindered by…

Eco-evolutionary dynamics is crucial to understand how individuals' behaviors and the surrounding environment interplay with each other. Typically, it is assumed that individuals update their behaviors via linear imitation function, i.e.,…

Main aim of this topical issue is to report recent advances in noisy nonequilibrium processes useful to describe the dynamics of ecological systems and to address the mechanisms of spatio-temporal pattern formation in ecology both from the…

Adaptation is used by biological sensory systems to respond to a wide range of environmental signals, by adapting their response properties to the statistics of the stimulus in order to maximize information transmission. We derive rules of…

This position paper argues that next-generation non-equilibrium-inspired generative models will provide the essential foundation for better modeling real-world complex dynamical systems. While many classical generative algorithms draw…

There does not exist a general positive correlation between important life-supporting properties and the entropy production rate. The simple reason is that nondissipative and time-symmetric kinetic aspects are also relevant for establishing…

A biological circuit is a neural or biochemical cascade, taking inputs and producing outputs. How have biological circuits learned to solve environmental challenges over the history of life? The answer certainly follows Dobzhansky's famous…

We construct a stochastic dynamical systems theory in which sustainability is a structural boundary property of a fully coupled Earth--Human--Production system. Each subsystem is modelled as a vector-valued process governed by stochastic…

The capacity to adapt can greatly influence the success of systems that need to compensate for damaged parts, learn how to achieve robust performance in new environments, or exploit novel opportunities that originate from new technological…