Related papers: A food-web based unified model of "macro"- and "mi…

In ecology it is widely recognised that many landscapes comprise a network of discrete patches of habitat. The species that inhabit the patches interact with each other through a foodweb, the network of feeding interactions. The…

We propose a class of evolutionary models that involves an arbitrary exchangeable process as the breeding process and different selection schemes. In those models, a new genome is born according to the breeding process, and then a genome is…

High-throughput experimental techniques and bioinformatics tools make it possible to obtain reconstructions of the metabolism of microbial species. Combined with mathematical frameworks such as flux balance analysis, which assumes that…

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,…

During batch growth on mixtures of two growth-limiting substrates, microbes consume the substrates either sequentially or simultaneously. These growth patterns are manifested in all types of bacteria and yeasts. The ubiquity of these growth…

Food webs are complex ecological networks whose structure is both ecologically and statistically constrained, with many network properties being correlated with each other. Despite the recognition of these invariable relationships in food…

Two density-dependent branching processes are considered to model predator-prey populations. For both models, preys are considered to be the main food supply of predators. Moreover, in each generation the number of individuals of each…

A simple model of biological extinction with variable system size is presented that exhibits a power-law distribution of extinction event sizes. The model is a generalization of a model recently introduced by Newman (Proc. R. Soc. Lond.…

We present new theoretical and empirical results on the probability distributions of species persistence times in natural ecosystems. Persistence times, defined as the timespans occurring between species' colonization and local extinction…

Biological organisms adapt to changes by processing informations from different sources, most notably from their ancestors and from their environment. We review an approach to quantify these informations by analyzing mathematical models of…

Coherence evolution of two food web models can be obtained under the stirring effect of chaotic advection. Each food web model sustains a three--level trophic system composed of interacting predators, consumers and vegetation. These…

We are interested in the impact of natural selection in a prey-predator community. We introduce an individual-based model of the community that takes into account both prey and predator phenotypes. Our aim is to understand the phenotypic…

Food web topology and energy flow rates across food web linkages can influence ecosystem properties such as stability. Stability predictions from current models of energy flow are often sensitive to details in their formulation, and their…

For years, a main focus of ecological research has been to better understand the complex dynamical interactions between species which comprise food webs. Using the connectance properties of a widely explored synthetic food web called the…

We study open-ended evolution by focusing on computational and information-processing dynamics underlying major evolutionary transitions. In doing so, we consider biological organisms as hierarchical dynamical systems that generate…

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…

We present a general model for the growth of weighted networks in which the structural growth is coupled with the edges' weight dynamical evolution. The model is based on a simple weight-driven dynamics and a weights' reinforcement…

We present a theory for the growth dynamics of the World Wide Web that takes into account the wide range of stochastic growth rates in the number of pages per site, as well as the fact that new sites are created at different times. This…

The two most fundamental processes describing change in biology, development and evolu-tion, occur over drastically different timescales, difficult to reconcile within a unified framework. Development involves temporal sequences of cell…

Food webs -- networks of predators and prey -- have long been known to exhibit "intervality": species can generally be ordered along a single axis in such a way that the prey of any given predator tend to lie on unbroken compact intervals.…