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In complex ecosystems such as microbial communities, there is constant ecological and evolutionary feedback between the residing species and the environment occurring on concurrent timescales. Species respond and adapt to their surroundings…
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…
Many biological populations exhibit diversity in their strategy for survival and reproduction in a given environment, and microbes are an example. We explore the fate of different strategies under sustained environmental change by…
We analyze a stylized model of co-evolution between any two purely competing species (e.g., host and parasite), both sexually reproducing. Similarly to a recent model of Livnat \etal~\cite{evolfocs14} the fitness of an individual depends on…
We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems, which are considered to be robust, self-organising and scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex, dynamic problems. So, this work is…
Biological evolution is a complex blend of ever changing structural stability, variability and emergence of new phenotypes, niches, ecosystems. We wish to argue that the evolution of life marks the end of a physics world view of law…
Numerous living systems are hierarchically organised, whereby replicating components are grouped into reproducing collectives -- e.g., organelles are grouped into cells, and cells are grouped into multicellular organisms. In such systems,…
Movement is fundamental to life, shaping population dynamics, biodiversity patterns, and ecosystem structure. Recent advances in tracking technology have enabled fundamental questions about movement to be tackled, leading to the development…
Situations where individuals have to contribute to joint efforts or share scarce resources are ubiquitous. Yet, without proper mechanisms to ensure cooperation, the evolutionary pressure to maximize individual success tends to create a…
Models relating to the Species-Area curve are usually defined at the species level, and concerned only with ecological timescales. We examine an individual-based model of co-evolution on a spatial lattice based on the Tangled Nature model,…
In the last decade, stochastic models have shown to be very useful for quantitative modelling of social processes. Here, a configurational master equation for the description of behavioral changes by pair interactions of individuals is…
Migration between different habitats is ubiquitous among biological populations. In this Letter, we study a simple quasispecies model for evolution in two different habitats, with different fitness landscapes, coupled through one-way…
When three species compete cyclically in a well-mixed, stochastic system of $N$ individuals, extinction is known to typically occur at times scaling as the system size $N$. This happens, for example, in rock-paper-scissors games or…
Earth system analysis is the study of the joint dynamics of biogeophysical, social and technological processes on our planet. To advance our understanding of possible future development pathways and identify management options for…
Many life-history traits, like the age at maturity or adult longevity, are important determinants of the generation time. For instance, semelparous species whose adults reproduce once and die have shorter generation times than iteroparous…
The learning dynamics of biological brains and artificial neural networks are of interest to both neuroscience and machine learning. A key difference between them is that neural networks are often trained from a randomly initialized state…
A primary motivation for our research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. Ecosystems are thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex,…
Which factors govern the evolution of mutation rates and emergence of species? Here, we address this question using a first principles model of life where population dynamics of asexual organisms is coupled to molecular properties and…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
Biodiversity research requires complete and detailed information to study ecosystem dynamics at different scales. Employing data-driven methods like Machine Learning is getting traction in ecology and more specific biodiversity, offering…