相关论文: Diverse communities behave like typical random eco…

Robert May famously used random matrix theory to predict that large, complex systems cannot admit stable fixed points. However, this general conclusion is not always supported by empirical observation: from cells to biomes, biological…

The self-organization of microbial ecosystems involves a large variety of mechanisms, ranging from biochemical signaling to population dynamics. Among these, the role of motility regulation has been little studied, despite the importance of…

Will a large economy be stable? Building on Robert May's original argument for large ecosystems, we conjecture that evolutionary and behavioural forces conspire to drive the economy towards marginal stability. We study networks of firms in…

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…

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…

Forty years ago, Robert May questioned a central belief in ecology by proving that sufficiently large or complex ecological networks have probability of persisting close to zero. To prove this point, he analyzed large networks in which…

Ecologists are interested in understanding and predicting how ecological communities change through time. While it might seem natural to measure this through changes in species' abundances, computational limitations mean transitions between…

Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…

Promoting and increasing energy efficiency is a promising method of reducing CO2 emissions and avoiding the potentially devastating effects of climate change. The question is: How do we induce a cultural or behavioural change whereby people…

Microbiome-based stratification of healthy individuals into compositional categories, referred to as "community types", holds promise for drastically improving personalized medicine. Despite this potential, the existence of community types…

We introduce an individual-based model of a complex ecological community with random interactions. The model contains a large number of species, each with a finite population of individuals, subject to discrete reproduction and death…

The competition for resources is a defining feature of microbial communities. In many contexts, from soils to host-associated communities, highly diverse microbes are organized into metabolic groups or guilds with similar resource…

Explaining the wide range of dynamics observed in ecological communities is challenging due to the large number of species involved, the complex network of interactions among them, and the influence of multiple environmental variables.…

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…

The Random Utility Model (RUM) is the gold standard in describing the behavior of a population of consumers. The RUM operates under the assumption of transitivity in consumers' preference relationships, but the empirical literature has…

Natural ecosystems, in particular on the microbial scale, are inhabited by a large number of species. The population size of each species is affected by interactions of individuals with each other and by spatial and temporal changes in…

High-throughput sequencing techniques such as metagenomic and metatranscriptomic technologies allow cataloging of functional characteristics of microbial community members as well as their taxonomic identity. Such studies have found that a…

Mays celebrated theoretical work of the 70s contradicted the established paradigm by demonstrating that complexity leads to instability in biological systems. Here Mays random-matrix modelling approach is generalized to realistic…

Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…

Microbes are often discussed in terms of dichotomies such as copiotrophic/oligotrophic and fast/slow-growing microbes, defined using the characterisation of microbial growth in isolated cultures. The dichotomies are usually qualitative…