Related papers: Why Nestedness in Mutualistic Networks?
Just as a herd of animals relies on its robust social structure to survive in the wild, similarly robustness is a crucial characteristic for the survival of a complex network under attack. The capacity to measure robustness in complex…
We study species abundance in the empirical plant-pollinator mutualistic networks exhibiting broad degree distributions, with uniform intra-group competition assumed, by the Lotka-Volterra equation. The stability of a fixed point is found…
How large ecosystems can create and maintain the remarkable biodiversity we see in nature is probably one of the biggest open questions in science, attracting attention from different fields, from Theoretical Ecology to Mathematics and…
The architecture of bipartite networks linking two classes of constituents is affected by the interactions within each class. For the bipartite networks representing the mutualistic relationship between pollinating animals and plants, it…
Living organisms, ecosystems, and social systems are examples of complex systems in which robustness against inclusion of new elements is an essential feature. A recently proposed simple model has revealed a general mechanism by which such…
A detailed analysis of three species-rich ecosystem food webs has shown that they display scale-free distributions of connections. Such graphs of interaction are in fact shared by a number of biological and technological networks, which…
The empirical study of network dynamics has been limited by the lack of longitudinal data. Here we introduce a quantitative indicator of link persistence to explore the correlations between the structure of a mobile phone network and the…
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…
The need to harmonise apparently irreconcilable arrangements in an ecosystem --nestedness and segregation-- has triggered so far different strategies. Methodological refinements, or the inclusion of behavioural preferences to the network…
Identifying and explaining the structure of complex networks at different scales has become an important problem across disciplines. At the mesoscale, modular architecture has attracted most of the attention. At the macroscale, other…
Natural systems are remarkably robust and resilient, maintaining essential functions despite variability, uncertainty, and hostile conditions. Understanding these nonlinear, dynamic behaviours is challenging because such systems involve…
A central concern of community ecology is the interdependence between interaction strengths and the underlying structure of the network upon which species interact. In this work we present a solvable example of such a feedback mechanism in…
We use tools of the equilibrium statistical mechanics of disordered systems to study analytically the statistical properties of an ecosystem composed of N species interacting via random, Gaussian interactions of order p >= 2, and…
Global environmental change is affecting species distribution and their interactions with other species. In particular, the main drivers of environmental change strongly affect the strength of interspecific interactions with considerable…
Recent research has identified interactions between networks as crucial for the outcome of evolutionary games taking place on them. While the consensus is that interdependence does promote cooperation by means of organizational complexity…
As new instances of nested organization --beyond ecological networks-- are discovered, scholars are debating around the co-existence of two apparently incompatible macroscale architectures: nestedness and modularity. The discussion is far…
Current theories about mechanisms promoting species co-existence in diverse communities assume that species only interact ecologically. Species are treated as discrete evolutionary entities, even though abundant empirical evidence indicates…
The long-term evolution of epidemic processes depends crucially on the structure of contact networks. As empirical evidence indicates that human populations exhibit strong community organization, we investigate here how such mesoscopic…
Despite the general acknowledgment of the role of niche and fitness differences in community dynamics, species abundance has been coined as a relevant feature not just regarding niche perspectives, but also according to neutral…
The persistence of biodiversity of species is a challenging proposition in ecological communities in the face of Darwinian selection. The present article investigates beyond the pairwise competitive interactions and provides a novel…