相关论文: Statistical Mechanics of Ecological Systems: Neutr…
We demonstrate how niche theory and Hubbell's original formulation of neutral theory can be blended together into a general framework modeling the combined effects of selection, drift, speciation, and dispersal on community dynamics. This…
A central issue in ecology today is that of the factors determining the relative abundance of species within a natural community. The proper application of the principles of statistical physics to the problem of species abundance…
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…
Hubbell's neutral theory of biodiversity has successfully explained the observed composition of many ecological communities but it relies on strict demographic equivalence among species and provides no room for evolutionary processes like…
Simplified mechanistic models in ecology have been criticized for the fact that a good fit to data does not imply the mechanism is true: pattern does not equal process. In parallel, the maximum entropy principle (MaxEnt) has been applied in…
The concept of neutral evolutionary networks being a significant factor in evolutionary dynamics was first proposed by Huynen {\em et al.} about 7 years ago. In one sense, the principle is easy to state -- because most mutations to an…
Understanding the forces shaping ecological communities is crucially important to basic science and conservation. In recent years, considerable progress was made in explaining communities using simple and general models, with neutral theory…
One of the first successes of neutral ecology was to predict realistically-broad distributions of rare and abundant species. However, it has remained an outstanding theoretical challenge to describe how this distribution of abundances…
Niche and neutral theory are two prevailing, yet much debated, ideas in ecology proposed to explain the patterns of biodiversity. Whereas niche theory emphasizes selective differences between species and interspecific interactions in…
We present a novel approach to represent ecological systems using reaction networks, and show how a particular framework called Chemical Organization Theory (COT) sheds new light on the longstanding complexity-stability debate. Namely, COT…
Bipartite networks provide an insightful representation of many systems, ranging from mutualistic networks of species interactions to investment networks in finance. The analysis of their topological structures has revealed the ubiquitous…
Recent theoretical approaches to community structure and dynamics reveal that many large-scale features of community structure (such as species-rank distributions and species-area relations) can be explained by a so-called neutral model.…
Fifty years ago, Robert MacArthur showed that stable equilibria optimize quadratic functions of the population sizes in several important ecological models. Here, we generalize this finding to a broader class of systems within the framework…
Understanding the relationship between complexity and stability in large dynamical systems -- such as ecosystems -- remains a key open question in complexity theory which has inspired a rich body of work developed over more than fifty…
Nonequilibrium statistical physics is concerned with a fundamental problem in physics, the phenomenon of irreversibility, which is not rigorously solved yet. Different approaches to the statistical mechanics of nonequilibrium processes are…
We discuss the relevance of studying ecology within the framework of Complexity Science from a statistical mechanics approach. Ecology is concerned with understanding how systems level properties emerge out of the multitude of interactions…
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…
Everyone can see that over the last 150 years, theoretical ecology has become considerably more mathematical. But what is the nature of this phenomenon? Are mathematics applied, as in the use of statistical tests, for example, or are they…
Biological and social networks have recently attracted enormous attention between physicists. Among several, two main aspects may be stressed: A non trivial topology of the graph describing the mutual interactions between agents exists…
Neutral models which assume ecological equivalence between species provide null models for community assembly. In Hubbell's Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity (UNTB), many local communities are connected to a single metacommunity…