26 papers · ranked by Valyu relevance
Juan Giral Martínez, Matthieu Barbier, Silvia De Monte, Rafael D’Andrea
Minimal models for complex ecosystems often assume random interactions, whose statistics suffice to predict dynamical and macroecological patterns. However, ecological networks commonly possess a variety of properties, such as hierarchies or functional groups, that structure species interactions. Here, we ask how…
Rukmani Ramachandran, Akshit Goyal
Complex systems with nonreciprocal interactions are often stratified into layers. Ecosystems are a prime example, where species at one trophic level grow by consuming those at another. Yet the dynamical consequences of such stratified nonreciprocity—where the correlation between growth and consumption differs across…
Jamila Rowland-Chandler, Wenying Shou, Akshit Goyal
A fundamental paradox in ecology is the relationship between species diversity and ecosystem stability: May’s stability condition predicts that species diversity destabilises communities, yet many diverse ecosystems in nature are stable. Here, we show that this paradox can be resolved by explicitly considering…
Nicolás A. Márquez, Maryam Chaib De Mares, Alejandro P. Riascos
In this paper, we introduce a general framework to quantify dissimilarities between generalized Lotka–Volterra dynamical processes, ranging from classical predator–prey systems to multispecies communities interacting on networks. The proposed measures capture both transient and stationary dynamics, allowing systematic…
Alexandre Fuster-Calvo, Katherine Hébert, Aleksandra J. Dolezal, Christine Parent + 3 more
Understanding how communities respond to environmental change requires assessing not just overall variability but also the structure of co-variation among taxa. We frame this idea under the Ecological Coherence (EC) framework, which generalizes previous notions such as community synchrony or coherence. EC captures the…
Ming-Qiang Wang, Georg Albert, Carlo L. Seifert, Douglas Chesters + 13 more
Biodiversity loss can destabilize ecosystem functioning. How biodiversity-stability relationships are interlinked across trophic levels remains poorly investigated, however, limiting our ability to predict ecosystem-level consequences of declining biodiversity. Here, we analyze the drivers of multi-year herbivore…
Jennifer Paige, Denis D. Patterson, Alan Hastings
Multiple stable states - the coexistence of two or more distinct ecological configurations under identical environmental conditions - have attracted sustained interest in ecology, yet the field still lacks a unified framework connecting ecological mechanisms to dynamical models. Here, we review empirical and…
G. V. Clemente, T. Caruso, M. Chomel, J. M. Lavallee + 6 more
A central goal of ecology is understanding how the architecture of food webs, which represent the structural backbone of ecosystems, affects their stability. The analysis of stability in the classical sense of population dynamics (i.e. return to equilibrium) can be successful for a single instance of an empirical food…
Luca Beldi, Alyssa Henderson, Megan N Y Lee, Julien S Luneau + 8 more
Many microbiological outcomes are shaped by the determinants of community composition, including the factors that allow pathogens to invade healthy microbiota and the processes that maintain the diversity that underpins soil function. Community ecology provides a rich conceptual toolset to investigate patterns of…
Yuvrajsingh Pravinsingh Patil, Eckehard Schöll, Fakhteh Ghanbarnejad, Chandrakala Meena
Ecological communities are shaped by the interplay between trophic interactions and infectious disease, yet how spatially mediated interactions influence disease-driven ecosystem dynamics remains poorly understood. Here, we develop a gravity-based eco-epidemiological framework for a tri-trophic food chain in which…
Adam T. Clark, Lauren G. Shoemaker, Jean‐François Arnoldi, György Barabás + 6 more
Coexistence is simultaneously one of the most fundamental concepts of ecology, and one of the most difficult to define. A particular challenge is that, despite a well-developed body of research, several different schools of thought have developed over the past century, leading to multiple independent, and largely…
Xufei Jiang, Rixiu Zhou, Wenzhang Dai, Yipeng Yao + 8 more
Cascade dams are widely recognized as major drivers of environmental change in river ecosystems and are associated with alterations in biodiversity and community stability. However, the factors associated with community stability at different spatial scales remain unclear. This study compared zooplankton community…
Lynn Govaert, Jessica Colombo, Florian Altermatt
Disturbances can negatively affect multiple levels of biological organization. With human activities increasing the intensity of disturbance regimes, we need to understand when and where adverse effects of disturbance occur. Yet, how landscape heterogeneity (i.e., variation in local resource availability and…
Eden J. Forbes, Spencer R. Hall
How and why do species interactions produce unstable dynamics? In the simplest models, the answers are straightforward. In the Rosenzweig-MacArthur predator-prey model, resource self-facilitation due to predation mortality triggers oscillations; in Lotka-Volterra competition, positive feedback from stronger…
Samali Ghosh, Arnob Ray, Everton S. Medeiros, Dibakar Ghosh + 4 more
Dispersal networks critically shape the fate of ecological communities, yet the mechanisms linking connectivity and persistence remain poorly understood. We show that an interplay between asymmetric dispersal and asynchronous dynamics across patches in a dispersal network can prevent predator extinction across broad…
Marco Menale, Carmelo Filippo Munafò, Francesco Oliveri
Kinetic theory frameworks are widely used for modeling stochastic interacting systems, where the evolution primarily depends on binary interactions. Recently, in this framework the action of the external force field has been introduction in order to gain a more realistic picture of some phenomena. In this paper, we…
Nirbhay Patil, Ada Altieri
Large ecosystems balance competition and cooperation, yet standard generalized Lotka--Volterra models make mutualism destabilizing by amplifying disorder and driving unbounded growth. We show that Monod-like saturation resolves this paradox: dynamical mean-field theory and random-matrix analysis reveal a broader stable…
Serguei Saavedra, Chengyi Long, Sonia Kéfi, Simon A. Levin + 3 more
Energy is the fundamental currency of life. Every organism requires a minimum intake to meet maintenance needs, and every trophic transfer dissipates part of the energy flow as heat. Classical theory has emphasized lower bounds on supply—the minimum resource level required for consumers to persist—yet the possible…
Hirokazu Toju, Kenta Suzuki, Martina Sánchez-Pinillos, Genta Shima + 15 more
Microbiomes are increasingly recognized as key to addressing global challenges in health and sustainability, as they can provide emergent biological functions unattainable with single microbial species. However, microbial communities occasionally undergo abrupt shifts in species composition despite their intrinsic…
Grifo Gabriele, Valenti Giovanna
This work investigates how toxin-mediated interactions and directed movements shape the emergence of coherent structures in plant-herbivore systems. The analysis focuses on a two-compartment model enclosing a toxin-dependent functional response and a cross-diffusion term that represents ecologically plausible…
G. Virginio Clemente, Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Giovanni Strona
Ecological communities can exhibit transient amplification after disturbance even if asymptotically stable, yet how environmental change reshapes these short-term responses in real food webs remains unclear. We combined four decades of monthly plankton observations from nine Swiss lakes with a food-web model to…
Eden J. Forbes, Jason D. Stockwell
Habitat complexity (HC) in part determines the diversity, stability, and behavior of food webs and can influence predation according to a wide variety of functional relationships. Many aquatic species provide habitat complexity and are also consumed by other species (e.g., macrophytes, corals, mussels). However, food…
Benedetta Ciarmoli, Sophie Marbach
Microbes constantly interact with their environment by depleting and transforming food sources. Theoretical studies have mainly focused on Lotka-Volterra models, which do not account for food source dynamics. In contrast, consumer-resource models, which consider food source dynamics, are less explored. In particular…
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Conservation chemistry is an emerging discipline focused on preventing the loss of biodiversity through molecular-level insight and intervention. As the planet enters a mass extinction event – driven by pollution, habitat loss, invasive species, climate change, overharvesting, and disease – chemical sciences offer…
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Nitrogen fixation plays a critical role in enhancing carbon sequestration, particularly in terrestrial ecosystems where plant productivity and microbial processes are tightly linked to nitrogen availability. Biological nitrogen fixation (BNF), carried out by free-living and symbiotic microorganisms such as Rhizobium…
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Time series data of atmospheric CO2 levels is highly autocorrelated with multiple timescale variations. In recent years, the data shows a persistent increase in these levels. To understand this persistence, we use enzyme activity and biological growth as analogous phenomena and draw comparisons with the atmospheric CO2…