Related papers: Pseudo-biodiversity effects across scales

We explore how physical scale and population size shape the emergence of complex behaviors in open-ended ecological environments. In our setting, agents are unsupervised and have no explicit rewards or learning objectives but instead evolve…

Environmental stochasticity is known to be a destabilizing factor, increasing abundance fluctuations and extinction rates of populations. However, the stability of a community may benefit from the differential response of species to…

Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…

Evolutionary algorithms have been successfully applied to a variety of optimisation problems in stationary environments. However, many real world optimisation problems are set in dynamic environments where the success criteria shifts…

Studies on distribution, abundance and diversity of species revealed fascinating universalities in macroecology. Many of these patterns, like the species-area and range-abundance relationship or the year-to-year fluctuations in population…

Multiple scales in metapopulations can give rise to paradoxical behaviour: in a conceptual model for a public goods game, the species associated with a fitness cost due to the public good production can be stabilised in the well-mixed limit…

We analyse numerically the effects of small population size in the initial transient regime of a simple example population dynamics. These effects play an important role for the numerical determination of large deviation functions of…

Determining the relative importance of environmental factors, biotic interactions and stochasticity in assembling and maintaining species-rich communities remains a major challenge in ecology. In plant communities, interactions between…

Positive density-dependence occurs when individuals experience increased survivorship, growth, or reproduction with increased population densities. Mechanisms leading to these positive relationships include mate limitation, saturating…

We consider a stochastic individual-based model of adaptive dynamics for an asexually reproducing population with mutation. Biologically motivated by the influence of seasons or the variation of drug concentration during medical treatment,…

Much of our understanding of ecological and evolutionary mechanisms derives from analysis of low-dimensional models: with few interacting species, or few axes defining "fitness". It is not always clear to what extent the intuition derived…

While the use of spatial agent-based and individual-based models has flourished across many scientific disciplines, the complexities these models generate are often difficult to manage and quantify. This research reduces population-driven,…

The influence of migration on the stochastic dynamics of subdivided populations is still an open issue in various evolutionary models. We develop here a self-consistent mean-field-like method in order to determine the effects of migration…

Two mathematical models of macroevolution are studied. These models have population dynamics at the species level, and mutations and extinction of species are also included. The population dynamics are updated by difference equations with…

Diversity indices are useful single-number metrics for characterizing a complex distribution of a set of attributes across a population of interest. The utility of these different metrics or sets of metrics depend on the context and…

What determines biodiversity in nature is a prominent issue in ecology, especially in biotic resource systems that are typically devoid of cross-feeding. Here, we show that by incorporating pairwise encounters among consumer individuals…

Evolutionary game dynamics is one of the most fruitful frameworks for studying evolution in different disciplines, from Biology to Economics. Within this context, the approach of choice for many researchers is the so-called replicator…

1. Animal movement patterns contribute to our understanding of variation in breeding success and survival of individuals, and the implications for population dynamics. 2. Over time, sensor technology for measuring movement patterns has…

Random walks and related spatial stochastic models have been used in a range of application areas including animal and plant ecology, infectious disease epidemiology, developmental biology, wound healing, and oncology. Classical random walk…

The magnitude and variability of Earth's biodiversity have puzzled scientists ever since paleontologic fossil databases became available. We identify and study a model of interdependent species where both endogenous and exogenous impacts…