Related papers: Ecosystems in the Anthropocene: transformative dri…
A primary motivation for our research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. Ecosystems are thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex,…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…
The climate system is a forced, dissipative, nonlinear, complex and heterogeneous system that is out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The system exhibits natural variability on many scales of motion, in time as well as space, and it is subject…
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…
Earth's atmosphere has evolved as volatile species cycle between the atmosphere, ocean, biomass and the solid Earth. The geochemical, biological and astrophysical processes that control atmospheric evolution are reviewed from an "Earth…
In this brief report we discuss how continuous changes on the physical parameters that determine the weather conditions may lead to long term climate variability. This variability of the weather patterns are a response to continuous random…
Ecosystems are complex and dynamic systems. Over billions of years, they have developed advanced capabilities to provide stable functions, despite changes in their environment. In this paper, we argue that the laws of organization and…
Apparent biodiversity on earth exists only if we compare different species separated from their environments. Meanwhile coexisting species have to be identical in terms of energetic interactions. Consider the biosphere as a network of…
We propose a minimal off-lattice model of living organisms where just a very few dynamical rules of growth are assumed. The stable coexistence of many clusters is detected when we replace the global restriction rule by a locally applied…
Global warming due to human-made gases, mainly CO2, is already 0.8{\deg}C and deleterious climate impacts are growing worldwide. More warming is 'in the pipeline' because Earth is out of energy balance, with absorbed solar energy exceeding…
Eco-evolutionary game dynamics which characterizes the mutual interactions and the coupled evolutions of strategies and environments has been of growing interests in very recent years. Since such feedback loops widely exist in a range of…
Our planet is roughly closed to matter, but open to energy input from the sun. However, to harness this energy, organisms must transform matter from one chemical (redox) state to another. For example, photosynthetic organisms can capture…
Humans are increasingly stressing ecosystems via habitat destruction, climate change and global population movements leading to the widespread loss of biodiversity and the disruption of key ecological services. Ecosystems characterized…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
Microbes providing public goods are widespread in nature despite running the risk of being exploited by free-riders. However, the precise ecological factors supporting cooperation are still puzzling. Following recent experiments, we…
Understanding systems level behaviour of many interacting agents is challenging in various ways, here we'll focus on the how the interaction between components can lead to hierarchical structures with different types of dynamics, or…
Biological evolution is realised through the same mechanisms of birth and death that underlie change in population density. The deep interdependence between ecology and evolution is well-established, and recent models focus on integrating…
In a complex system, the individual components are neither so tightly coupled or correlated that they can all be treated as a single unit, nor so uncorrelated that they can be approximated as independent entities. Instead, patterns of…
The mechanisms underlying eco-evolutionary dynamics (the feedback between ecological and evolutionary processes) are often unknown. Here, we propose that classical theory from behavioral ecology can provide a greater understanding of the…
Vegetation often understood merely as the result of long-term climate conditions. However, vegetation itself plays a fundamental role in shaping Earth's climate by regulating the energy, water, and biogeochemical cycles across terrestrial…