Related papers: Modelling coevolution in multispecies communities

In a complex community, species continuously adapt to each other. On rare occasions, the adaptation of a species can lead to the extinction of others, and even its own. "Adaptive dynamics" is the standard mathematical framework to describe…

A principle of evolutionary adaptation is applied to the Lotka--Volterra models, in particular to the food webs. We present a relatively simple computational algorithm of optimization with respect to a given criterion. This algorithm boils…

We consider the concept of mutual information in ecological networks, and use this idea to analyse the Tangled Nature model of co-evolution. We show that this measure of correlation has two distinct behaviours depending on how we define the…

In models for the evolution of predation from initially purely competitive species interactions, the propensity of predation is most often assumed to be a direct consequence of the relative morphological and physiological traits of…

Natural ecosystems are characterized by striking diversity of form and functions and yet exhibit deep symmetries emerging across scales of space, time and organizational complexity. Species-area relationships and species-abundance…

The question what determines the structure of natural food webs has been listed among the nine most important unanswered questions in ecology. It arises naturally from many problems related to ecosystem stability and resilience. The…

We study a version of the Tangled Nature model of evolutionary ecology redefined in a phenotype space where mutants have properties correlated to their parents. The model has individual-based dynamics whilst incorporating species scale…

The complexity of an ecological community can be distilled into a network, where diverse interactions connect species in a web of dependencies. Species interact not only with each other but indirectly through environmental effects, however…

We present an individual based model of evolutionary ecology. The reproduction rate of individuals characterized by their genome depends on the composition of the population in genotype space. Ecological features such as the taxonomy and…

Mutualistic networks have been shown to involve complex patterns of interactions among animal and plant species. The architecture of these webs seems to pervade some of their robust and fragile behaviour. Recent work indicates that there is…

Mass extinction is a phenomenon in the history of life on Earth when a considerable number of species go extinct over a relatively short period of time. The magnitude of extinction varies between the events, the most well known are the…

Notable recent works have focused on the multi-layer properties of coevolving diseases. We point out that very similar systems play an important role in population ecology. Specifically we study a meta food-web model that was recently…

We adapt existing statistical modeling techniques for social networks to study consumption data observed in trophic food webs. These data describe the feeding volume (non-negative) among organisms grouped into nodes, called trophic species,…

The stability of ecosystems as well as the relation between topology and dynamics on multilayer networks are important questions that are usually discussed in separate communities. Here, we combine these two topics by investigating the…

Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…

Information diffusion in online social networks is affected by the underlying network topology, but it also has the power to change it. Online users are constantly creating new links when exposed to new information sources, and in turn…

We introduce a model of biological evolution where species evolve in response to biotic interactions and a fluctuating environmental stress. The species may either become extinct or mutate to acquire a new fitness value when the effective…

Genetic information and environmental factors determine the path of an individuals life and therefore, the evolution of its entire species. We have succeeded in proposing and studying a model that captures this idea. In our model, a…

Character evolution that affects ecological community interactions often occurs contemporaneously with temporal changes in population size, potentially altering the very nature of those dynamics. Such eco-evolutionary processes may be most…

The robustness of an ecological network quantifies the resilience of the ecosystem it represents to species loss. It corresponds to the proportion of species that are disconnected from the rest of the network when extinctions occur…