Related papers: Environmental Physics: Physical Principles and App…

The investigation of planets around other stars began with the study of gas giants, but is now extending to the discovery and characterization of super-Earths and terrestrial planets. Motivated by this observational tide, we survey the…

The modeling of complex systems such as ecological or socio-economic systems can be very challenging. Although various modeling approaches exist, they are generally not compatible and mutually consistent, and empirical data often do not…

The recent discoveries of terrestrial exoplanets and super-Earths extending over a broad range of orbital and physical parameters suggest that these planets will span a wide range of climatic regimes. Characterization of the atmospheres of…

Quantum systems are invariably open, evolving under surrounding influences rather than in isolation. Standard open quantum system methods eliminate all information on the environmental state to yield a tractable description of the system…

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…

This article reviews the emerging field of exo-geoscience, focusing on the geological and geophysical processes thought to influence the evolution and (eu)habitability of rocky exoplanets. We examine the possible roles of planetary…

Living systems are typically characterized by irreversible processes. A condition equivalent to the reversibility is the detailed balance, whose absence is an obstacle for analytically solving ecological models. We revisit a promising model…

This note discusses dynamical systems-systems that evolve through time. We start with two contemporary examples illustrating the qualitative and the quantitative behavior of dynamical systems. These are two broad categories, usually called…

Differential equations based on physical principals are used to represent complex dynamic systems in all fields of science and engineering. Through repeated use in both academics and industry, these equations have been shown to represent…

Living systems operate far from equilibrium, yet few general frameworks provide global bounds on biological transients. In high-dimensional biological networks like ecosystems, long transients arise from the separate timescales of…

We explore how physical scale and population size shape the emergence of complex behaviors in open-ended ecological environments. In our setting, agents are unsupervised and have no explicit rewards or learning objectives but instead evolve…

Ecosystems are commonly conceptualized as networks of interacting species. However, partitioning natural diversity of organisms into discrete units is notoriously problematic, and mounting experimental evidence raises the intriguing…

Ecological systems often exhibit complex nonlinear dynamics like oscillations, chaos, and regime shifts. Universal dynamic equations have shown promise in modeling complex dynamics by combining known functional forms with neural networks…

1. Theoretical models pertaining to feedbacks between ecological and evolutionary processes are prevalent in multiple biological fields. An integrative overview is currently lacking, due to little crosstalk between the fields and the use of…

Ecosystems display a complex spatial organization. Ecologists have long tried to characterize them by looking at how different measures of biodiversity change across spatial scales. Ecological neutral theory has provided simple predictions…

The notion that the whole is more than the sum of its parts has a long tradition in science. This, of course, also applies to the Earth system. With its myriad of processes, spanning from purely physical to life and human activity, the…

Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…

The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…

The well-defined but intricate course of time evolution exhibited by many naturally occurring phenomena suggests some source of dynamic order sustaining it. In spite of its obviousness as a problem, it has remained absent from the…

While fields like Artificial Life have made huge strides in quantifying the mechanisms that distinguish living systems from non-living ones, particular mechanisms remain difficult to reproduce in silico. Known as open-endedness, we've been…