Related papers: Intermittent precipitation and spatial Allee effec…
In drylands, water availability determines plant population densities and whether they cooperate via facilitation or compete. When water scarcity intensifies, plant densities decrease and competition for water surpasses the benefits of soil…
The component Allee effect (AE) is the positive correlation between an organism's fitness component and population density. Depending on the population spatial structure, which determines the interactions between organisms, a component AE…
The soil seed bank is a major component of plant communities. However, long-term analyses of the dynamics of the seed bank and the ensuing vegetation are rare. Here, we studied the dynamics in plant communities with high dominance of…
The formation of out-of-equilibrium patterns is a characteristic feature of spatially-extended, biodiverse, ecological systems. Intriguing examples are provided by cyclic competition of species, as metaphorically described by the…
Noise and spatial degrees of freedom characterize most ecosystems. Some aspects of their influence on the coevolution of populations with cyclic interspecies competition have been demonstrated in recent experiments [e.g. B. Kerr et al.,…
We explore the connection between migration patterns and emergent behaviors of evolving populations in spatially heterogeneous environments. Despite extensive studies in ecologically and medically important systems, a unifying framework…
Although riparian vegetation is present in or along many water courses of the world, its active role resulting from the interaction with flow and sediment processes has only recently become an active field of research. Especially, the role…
Deriving emergent patterns from models of biological processes is a core concern of mathematical biology. In the context of partial differential equations (PDEs), these emergent patterns sometimes appear as local minimisers of a…
Personality traits, such as boldness and shyness, play a significant role in shaping the survival strategies of animals. Industrial pollution has long posed serious threats to ecosystems and is typically distributed heterogeneously.…
We present a modified water-vegetation model to investigate the mechanistic relationship between infiltration-soil moisture feedback and vegetation pattern in arid/semi-arid ecosystems. Employing Turing pattern formation theory, we drive…
Spatial metapopulation models are fundamental to theoretical ecology, enabling to study how landscape structure influences global species dynamics. Traditional models, including recent generalizations, often rely on the deterministic limit…
A complex interplay between species governs the evolution of spatial patterns in ecology. An open problem in the biological sciences is characterising spatio-temporal data and understanding how changes at the local scale affect global…
Decisions to disperse from a habitat stand out among organismal behaviors as pivotal drivers of ecosystem dynamics across scales. Encounters with other species are an important component of adaptive decision-making in dispersal, resulting…
Alignment interactions in active matter are typically modeled as relaxational dynamics toward local consensus. In unbounded systems, this makes alignment effectively decoupled from local density and therefore unable to sustain self-confined…
We live in a time where climate models predict future increases in environmental variability and biological invasions are becoming increasingly frequent. A key to developing effective responses to biological invasions in increasingly…
Soil is a complex, dynamic material, with physical properties that depend on its biological content. We propose a cellular automaton model for self-organizing soil structure, where soil aggregates and serves as food for microbial species.…
The spatial dispersal of individuals is known to play an important role in the dynamics of populations, and is central to metapopulation theory. At the same time, local adaptation to environmental conditions creates a geographic mosaic of…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
Tree-grass coexistence is a defining feature of savanna ecosystems, which play an important role in supporting biodiversity and human populations worldwide. While recent advances have clarified many of the underlying processes, how these…
Over the past century, nonlinear difference and differential equations have been used to understand conditions for species coexistence. However, these models fail to account for random fluctuations due to demographic and environmental…