Related papers: A model for evolution and extinction
We introduce a simple computational model that, with a microscopic dynamics driven by natural selection and mutation alone, allows the description of true speciation events. A statistical analysis of the so generated evolutionary tree…
We introduce an individual-based model of a complex ecological community with random interactions. The model contains a large number of species, each with a finite population of individuals, subject to discrete reproduction and death…
We introduce a model designed to account for the influence of a line with fast diffusion-such as a road or another transport network-on the dynamics of a population in an ecological niche. This model consists of a system of coupled…
Community ecology has traditionally relied on the competitive exclusion principle, a piece of common wisdom in conceptual frameworks developed to describe species assemblages. Key concepts in community ecology, such as limiting similarity…
Mathematical modelling of the evolution of the size-spectrum dynamics in aquatic ecosystems was discovered to be a powerful tool to have a deeper insight into impacts of human- and environmental driven changes on the marine ecosystem. In…
We study a lattice model of a multi-species prey-predator system. Numerical results show that for a small mutation rate the model develops irregular long-period oscillatory behavior with sizeable changes in a number of species. The…
We study a model ecosystem by means of dynamical techniques from disordered systems theory. The model describes a set of species subject to competitive interactions through a background of resources, which they feed upon. Additionally…
In the interest of conservation, the importance of having a large habitat available for a species is widely known. Here, we introduce a lattice-based model for a population and look at the importance of fluctuations as well as that of the…
The coupling between evolutionary and ecological changes (eco-evolutionary dynamics) has been shown to be relevant among diverse species, and is also of interest outside of ecology, i.e. in cancer evolution. These dynamics play an important…
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…
The dynamics of species' densities depend both on internal and external variables. Internal variables include frequencies of individuals exhibiting different phenotypes or living in different spatial locations. External variables include…
Competitive birth-death processes often exhibit an oscillatory behavior. We investigate a particular case where the oscillation cycles are marginally stable on the mean-field level. An iconic example of such a system is the Lotka-Volterra…
We discuss the relevance of studying ecology within the framework of Complexity Science from a statistical mechanics approach. Ecology is concerned with understanding how systems level properties emerge out of the multitude of interactions…
Extinction appears ubiquitously in many fields, including chemical reactions, population biology, evolution, and epidemiology. Even though extinction as a random process is a rare event, its occurrence is observed in large finite…
We propose a model for evolution aiming to reproduce statistical features of fossil data, in particular the distributions of extinction events, the distribution of species per genus and the distribution of lifetimes, all of which are known…
A multispecies artificial ecosystem is formulated using cellular automata with species interactions and food chain hierarchy. The constructed finite state automaton can simulate the complexity and self-organized characteristics of the…
Given that extinction in a bisexual population is certain, we study a way to approximate the time when this extinction occurs. Our study is based on standard tools from Extreme Value Theory, which in practice are very easy to implement. We…
Computer modelling for evolutionary systems consists in: 1) to store in the memory the individual features of each member of a large population; and 2) to update the whole system repeatedly, as time goes by, according to some prescribed…
A model of the dynamics of natural rotifer populations is described as a discrete nonlinear map depending on three parameters, which reflect characteristics of the population and environment. Model dynamics and their change by variation of…
The networks of predator-prey interactions in ecological systems are remarkably complex, but nevertheless surprisingly stable in terms of long term persistence of the system as a whole. In order to understand the mechanism driving the…