Related papers: Ecological modelling of hycean worlds
A fundamental problem in evolutionary ecology research is to explain how different species coexist in natural ecosystems. This question is directly related with species trophic competition. However, competition theory, based on the…
For more than 3.5 billion years, life experienced dramatic environmental extremes on Earth. These include shifts from oxygen-less to over-oxygenated atmospheres and cycling between hothouse conditions and global glaciations. Meanwhile, an…
Planetary obliquity is a first order control on planetary climate and seasonal contrast, which has a number of cascading consequences for life. How moderately high obliquity (obliquities greater than Earth's current obliquity up to…
Higher-order interactions are increasingly recognized as a key component of ecological dynamics. However, we show that higher-order Lotka-Volterra dynamics can, in some scenarios, be accurately reproduced by effective pairwise models fitted…
Studying the habitability, internal structure and composition of exoplanets is crucial for understanding their potential to sustain life beyond our solar system. Characterizing planetary structures and atmospheric evolution provides…
Recently, many Earth-sized planets have been discovered around stars other than the Sun that might possess appropriate conditions for life. The development of theoretical methods for assessing the putative habitability of these worlds is of…
Many organisms form colonies for a transient period of time to withstand environmental pressure. Bacterial biofilms are a prototypical example of such behavior. Despite significant interest across disciplines, physical mechanisms governing…
Small rocky planets, as well as larger planets that suffered extensive volatile loss, tend to be drier and have thinner atmospheres as compared to Earth. Such planets probably outnumber worlds better endowed with volatiles, being the most…
Bacteria are prolific at colonizing diverse surfaces under a widerange of environmental conditions, and exhibit fascinating examples of self-organization across scales. Though it has recently attracted considerable interest, the role of…
Cyclic dominance of species has been identified as a potential mechanism to maintain biodiversity, see e.g. B. Kerr, M. A. Riley, M. W. Feldman and B. J. M. Bohannan [Nature {\bf 418}, 171 (2002)] and B. Kirkup and M. A. Riley [Nature {\bf…
Ecosystems represent archetypal complex dynamical systems, often modelled by coupled differential equations of the form $$ \frac{d x_i}{d t} = x_i \varphi_i(x_1,\cdots, x_N)\ , $$ where $N$ represents the number of species and $x_i$, the…
Reaction-diffusion systems with a Lotka-Volterra-type reaction term, also known as competition-diffusion systems, have been used to investigate the dynamics of the competition among $m$ ecological species for a limited resource necessary to…
A self-similar hierarchical solution that is both dynamically and evolutionarily stable is found to the multi dimensional Lotka-Volterra equation with a single chain of prey-predator relations. This gives a simple and natural explanation to…
Extrasolar terrestrial planets with the potential to host life might have large obliquities or be subject to strong obliquity variations. We revisit the habitability of oblique planets with an energy balance climate model (EBM) allowing for…
This paper reviews habitability conditions for a terrestrial planet from the point of view of geosciences. It addresses how interactions between the interior of a planet or a moon and its atmosphere and surface (including hydrosphere and…
In this note, we study the long time behavior of Lotka-Volterra systems whose coefficients vary randomly. Bena{\"i}m and Lobry (2015) recently established that randomly switching between two environments that are both favorable to the same…
The discovery of planets orbiting stars other than the Sun has accelerated over the past decade, and this trend will continue as new space- and ground-based observatories employ next-generation instrumentation to search the skies for…
We develop a classification scheme for the evolutionary state of planets based on the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of their coupled systems, including the presence of a biosphere and the possibility of what we call an agency-dominated…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
It remains to be ascertained whether sub-Neptune exoplanets primarily possess hydrogen-rich atmospheres or whether a population of H$_2$O-rich "water worlds" lurks in their midst. Addressing this question requires improved modeling of…