Related papers: Self-organized criticality, evolution and the foss…
Globally disruptive events include asteroid/comet impacts, large igneous provinces and glaciations, all of which have been considered as contributors to mass extinctions. Understanding the overall relationship between the timings of the…
When four species compete stochastically in a cyclic way, the formation of two teams of mutually neutral partners is observed. In this paper we study through numerical simulations the extinction processes that can take place in this system…
Ecological communities exhibit pervasive patterns and inter-relationships between size, abundance, and the availability of resources. We use scaling ideas to develop a unified, model-independent framework for understanding the distribution…
Let $T$ be the extinction moment of a critical branching process $Z=(Z_{n},n\geq 0) $ in a random environment specified by iid probability generating functions. We study the asymptotic behavior of the probability of extinction of the…
Multiple species in the ecosystem are believed to compete cyclically for survival and thus maintain balance in nature. Stochasticity has also an inevitable role in this dynamics. Considering these attributes of nature, the stochastic…
Phenotypic plasticity and its evolution may help evolutionary rescue in a novel and stressful environment, especially if environmental novelty reveals cryptic genetic variation that enables the evolution of increased plasticity. However,…
Isolated populations ultimately go extinct because of the intrinsic noise of elementary processes. In multi-population systems extinction of a population may occur via more than one route. We investigate this generic situation in a simple…
Planning for the protection of species often involves difficult choices about which species to prioritize, given constrained resources. One way of prioritizing species is to consider their "evolutionary distinctiveness", i.e. their relative…
We consider a system of two stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with competing two-way interactions driven by Brownian motions and spectrally positive $\alpha$-stable random measures. Such a SDE system can be identified as a…
Critical gravitational collapse and self similarity are used to probe the mass distribution of subsolar objects. We demonstrate that at very low mass the distribution is given by a power law, with an exponent opposite in sign to that…
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…
In numerous papers, the behaviour of stochastic population models is investigated through the sign of a real quantity which is the growth rate of the population near the extinction set. In many cases, it is proven that when this growth rate…
The extinction of species is a major problem of concern with a large literature. Our investigation gives insight into when species extinctions must occur, with an emphasis on determining which species might possibly die out and on how fast…
We show that large, slowly driven systems can evolve to a self-organized critical state where long range temporal correlations between bursts or avalanches produce low frequency $1/f^{\alpha}$ noise. The avalanches can occur instantaneously…
There has been some confusion concerning the animal group-size: an exponential distribution was deduced by maximizing the entropy; lognormal distributions were practically used; a power-law decay with exponent {3/2} was proposed in physical…
We develop a discrete-event modeling framework that captures the progression of geophysical systems toward catastrophic failure through sequences of distinct damage events. By representing system evolution as a succession of temporally…
We investigate the kinetics of many-species systems with aggregation of similar species clusters and annihilation of opposite species clusters. We find that the interplay between aggregation and annihilation leads to rich kinetic behaviors…
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…
The two major approaches to studying macroevolution in deep time are the fossil record and reconstructed relationships among extant taxa from molecular data. Results based on one approach sometimes conflict with those based on the other,…
The eco-evolutionary dynamics of species are fundamentally linked to the energetic constraints of its constituent individuals. Of particular importance is the interplay between reproduction and the dynamics of starvation and recovery. To…