Related papers: Environmental changes, co-extinction, and patterns…
The extinction of species is a core process that affects the diversity of life on Earth. One way of investigating the causes and consequences of extinctions is to build conceptual ecological models, and to use the dynamical outcomes of such…
Simulations of the coevolution of many interacting species are performed using the Webworld model. The model has a realistic set of predator-prey equations that describe the population dynamics of the species for any structure of the food…
We develop a mathematical model of extinction and coexistence in a generic predator-prey ecosystem composed of two herbivores in asymmetrical competition and a hunter exerting a predatory pressure on both species. With the aim of…
Recent methodological advances are enabling better examination of speciation and extinction processes and patterns. A major open question is the origin of large discrepancies in species number between groups of the same age. Existing…
Species extinction occurs regularly and unavoidably in ecological systems. The time scales for extinction can broadly vary and inform on the ecosystem's stability. We study the spatio-temporal extinction dynamics of a paradigmatic…
Food-web perturbations stemming from climate change, overexploitation, invasive species, and habitat degradation often cause an initial loss of species that results in a cascade of secondary extinctions, posing considerable challenges to…
Ecology and evolution are inseparable. Motivated by some recent experiments, we have developed models of evolutionary ecology from the perspective of dynamic networks. In these models, in addition to the intra-node dynamics, which…
Population genetics struggles to model extinction; standard models track the relative rather than absolute fitness of genotypes, while the exceptions describe only the short-term transition from imminent doom to evolutionary rescue. But…
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…
Species extinction is a core process that affects the diversity of life on Earth. Competition between species in a population is considered by ecological niche-based theories as a key factor leading to different severity of species…
Twenty years ago, after analysing palaeontological data, Raup and Sepkoski suggested that mass extinctions on Earth appear cyclically in time with a period of approximately 26 million years (My). To explain the 26My period, a number of…
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…
We study the stochastic evolution of four species in cyclic competition in a well mixed environment. In systems composed of a finite number $N$ of particles these simple interaction rules result in a rich variety of extinction scenarios,…
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…
Ecological systems are complex dynamical systems. Modelling efforts on ecosystems' dynamical stability have revealed that population dynamics, being highly nonlinear, can be governed by complex fluctuations. Indeed, experimental and field…
We present a stochastic model for the size of a taxon in paleobiology, in which we allow for the evolution of new taxon members, and both individual and catastrophic extinction events. The model uses ideas from the theory of birth and death…
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…
Ecological systems comprise an astonishing diversity of species that cooperate or compete with each other forming complex mutual dependencies. The minimum requirements to maintain a large species diversity on long time scales are in general…
We have generalized our ``unified'' model of evolutionary ecology by taking into account the possible movements of the organisms from one ``patch'' to another within the same eco-system. We model the spatial extension of the eco-system…
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.…