Related papers: Statistical mechanics unifies different ecological…

Organisms adapt to fluctuating environments by regulating their dynamics, and by adjusting their phenotypes to environmental changes. We model population growth using multitype branching processes in random environments, where the offspring…

Highly-diverse ecosystems exhibit a broad distribution of population sizes and species turnover, where species at high and low abundances are exchanged over time. We show that these two features generically emerge in the fluctuating phase…

Jaynes' maximum entropy (MaxEnt) principle was recently used to give a conditional, local derivation of the ``maximum entropy production'' (MEP) principle, which states that a flow system with fixed flow(s) or gradient(s) will converge to a…

Ecosystems frequently display the coexistence of diverse species under resource competition, typically resulting in skewed distributions of rarity and abundance. A potential driver of such coexistence is environmental fluctuations that…

This study investigates entropy's potential for analyzing scientific research patterns across disciplines. Originating from thermodynamics, entropy now measures uncertainty and diversity in information systems. We examine Shannon Entropy,…

In any ecosystem, the conditions of the environment and the characteristics of the species that inhabit it are entangled, co-evolving in space and time. We introduce a model that couples active agents with a dynamic environment, interpreted…

We prove that information-theoretic maximum entropy (MaxEnt) approach to canonical ensemble is mathematically equivalent to the classic approach of Boltzmann, Gibbs and Darwin-Fowler. The two approaches, however, "interpret" a same…

The MaxEnt solutions are shown to display a variety of behaviors (beyond the traditional and customary exponential one) if adequate dynamical information is inserted into the concomitant entropic-variational principle. In particular, we…

A fundamental theory is presented for the mechanical response of polymer networks undergoing large deformation which seamlessly integrates statistical mechanical principles with macroscopic thermodynamic constitutive theory. Our formulation…

This thesis focuses on the applications of mathematical tools and concepts brought from nonequilibrium statistical physics to the modeling of ecological problems. The first part provides a short introduction where the theoretical concepts…

Surveys of microbial biodiversity such as the Earth Microbiome Project (EMP) and the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) have revealed robust ecological patterns across different environments. A major goal in ecology is to leverage these…

We review the statistical mechanics approach to the study of the emerging collective behavior of systems of heterogeneous interacting agents. The general framework is presented through examples is such contexts as ecosystem dynamics and…

Maximum Entropy is a powerful concept that entails a sharp separation between relevant and irrelevant variables. It is typically invoked in inference, once an assumption is made on what the relevant variables are, in order to estimate a…

The entropy maximum approach (Maxent) was developed as a minimization of the subjective uncertainty measured by the Boltzmann--Gibbs--Shannon entropy. Many new entropies have been invented in the second half of the 20th century. Now there…

Ecologists have long suspected that species are more likely to interact if their traits match in a particular way. For example, a pollination interaction may be more likely if the proportions of a bee's tongue fit a plant's flower shape.…

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…

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…

Superstatistics describes nonequilibrium steady states as superpositions of canonical ensembles with a probability distribution of temperatures. Rather than assume a certain distribution of temperature, recently [J. Phys. A: Math. Theor.…

If predictions for species extinctions hold, then the `tree of life' today may be quite different to that in (say) 100 years. We describe a technique to quantify how much each species is likely to contribute to future biodiversity, as…

Motivation: Stochastic reaction networks are a widespread model to describe biological systems where the presence of noise is relevant, such as in cell regulatory processes. Unfortu-nately, in all but simplest models the resulting discrete…