Related papers: Why Nestedness in Mutualistic Networks?
Coextinction models are useful to understand community robustness to species loss and resilience to disturbances. We simulated pollinator extinctions in pollination networks by using a hybrid model that combined a recently developed…
Interactions are ubiquitous across biological systems. These interactions can be abstracted as patterns of connections among distinct units such as genes, proteins, individual organisms, or species which form a hierarchy of biological…
In this work we present a strategic network formation model predicting the emergence of multigroup structures. Individuals decide to form or remove links based on the benefits and costs those connections carry; we focus on bilateral consent…
We consider the optimal spacing between marine reserves for maximising the viability of a species occupying a reserve network. The closer the networks are placed together, the higher the probability of colonisation of an empty reserve by an…
Does an ecological community allow stable coexistence? Identifying the general principles that determine the answer to this question is a central problem of theoretical ecology. Random matrix theory approaches have uncovered the general…
Ecological models traditionally explain stability and coexistence through pairwise interactions among species. These interactions can also involve groups of three or more species, higher-order interactions, which recent theory suggests can…
Nestedness is a property of bipartite complex networks that has been shown to characterize the peculiar structure of biological and economical networks. In a nested network, a node of low degree has its neighborhood included in the…
Mutualisms are key for structuring ecological communities, but they are sensitive to environmental change and fluctuations in population size. Consequently, how mutualisms achieve stability remains an open question in ecological theory.…
A classic measure of ecological stability describes the tendency of a community to return to equilibrium after small perturbation. While many advances show how the network structure of these communities severely constrains such tendencies,…
Collapses of dynamical systems into irrecoverable states are observed in ecosystems, human societies, financial systems and network infrastructures. Despite their widespread occurrence and impact, these events remain largely unpredictable.…
In contrast to dyadic interactions, higher-order interactions may contain one another, with subgroups naturally embedded within larger groups. These containment patterns arise empirically in ecology, sociology, computer science and the…
Understanding the emergence and sustainability of cooperation is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology and is frequently studied by the framework of evolutionary game theory. A very powerful mechanism to promote cooperation is…
We consider a multi-layer network with two layers, $\mathcal{L}_{1}$, $\mathcal{L}_{2}$. Their intra-layer topology shows a scale-free degree distribution and a core-periphery structure. A nested structure describes the inter-layer…
What determines biodiversity in nature is a prominent issue in ecology, especially in biotic resource systems that are typically devoid of cross-feeding. Here, we show that by incorporating pairwise encounters among consumer individuals…
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…
Identifying the rank of species in a social or ecological network is a difficult task, since the rank of each species is invariably determined by complex interactions stipulated with other species. Simply put, the rank of a species is a…
Components in many real-world complex systems depend on each other for the resources required for survival, and may die of a shortage. These patterns of dependencies often take the form of a complex network whose structure potentially…
A recent problem in community ecology lies in defining structures behind matrices of species interactions. The interest in this area is to quantify the nestedness degree of the matrix after its maximal packing. In this work we evaluate…
Mutualistic communities have an internal structure that makes them resilient to external per- turbations. Late research has focused on their stability and the topology of the relations between the different organisms to explain the reasons…
Patterns of nestedness and specialization asymmetry, where specialist species interact mainly with generalists while generalists interact with both generalists and specialists, are often observed in mutualistic and antagonistic bi-partite…