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We describe a simple model of evolution which incorporates the branching and extinction of species lines, and also includes abiotic influences. A first principles approach is taken in which the probability for speciation and extinction are…
In the last years, a remarkable theoretical effort has been made in order to understand stability and complexity in ecological communities. The non-random structures of real ecological interaction networks has been recognized as one key…
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…
Species' interactions are shaped by their traits. Thus, we expect traits -- in particular, trait (dis)similarity -- to play a central role in determining whether a particular set of species coexists. Traits are, in turn, the outcome of an…
Understanding the behaviors of ecological systems is challenging given their multi-faceted complexity. To proceed, theoretical models such as Lotka-Volterra dynamics with random interactions have been investigated by the dynamical…
One of the first successes of neutral ecology was to predict realistically-broad distributions of rare and abundant species. However, it has remained an outstanding theoretical challenge to describe how this distribution of abundances…
Exploiting the mathematical curiosity of intransitive dice, we present a simple theoretical model for co-evolution that captures scales ranging from the genome of the individual to the system-wide emergence of species diversity. We study a…
Understanding factors that shape biodiversity and species coexistence across scales is of utmost importance in ecology, both theoretically and for conservation policies. Species-area relationships (SARs), measuring how the number of…
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…
The mathematical models used to capture features of complex, biological systems are typically non-linear, meaning that there are no generally valid simple relationships between their outputs and the data that might be used to validate them.…
We study the biodiversity problem for resource competition systems with extinctions and self-limitation effects. Our main result establishes estimates of biodiversity in terms of the fundamental parameters of the model. We also prove the…
Biological systems exhibit two structural features on many levels of organization: sparseness, in which only a small fraction of possible interactions between components actually occur; and modularity - the near decomposability of the…
Geographic ranges of communities of species evolve in response to environmental, ecological, and evolutionary forces. Understanding the effects of these forces on species' range dynamics is a major goal of spatial ecology. Previous…
Evolutionary transitions among ecological interactions are widely known, although their detailed dynamics remain absent for most population models. Adaptive dynamics has been used to illustrate how the parameters of population models might…
Many biological systems perform close to their physical limits, but promoting this optimality to a general principle seems to require implausibly fine tuning of parameters. Using examples from a wide range of systems, we show that this…
In order to model real ecological systems one has to consider many species that interact in complex ways. However, most of the recent theoretical studies have been restricted to few species systems with rather trivial interactions. The few…
We develop a theoretical framework to understand the persistence and coexistence of competitive species in a spatially explicit metacommunity model with a heterogeneous dispersal kernel. Our analysis, based on methods from the physics of…
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…
In an attempt to explain the uniqueness of the coding mechanism of living cells as contrasted with multi-species structure of ecosystems we examine two models of individuals with some replicative properties. In the first model the system…
Predicting the adaptation of populations to a changing environment is crucial to assess the impact of human activities on biodiversity. Many theoretical studies have tackled this issue by modeling the evolution of quantitative traits…