The interplay of population dynamics and evolution within ecological communities has been of long-standing interest for ecologists and can give rise to evolutionary cycles, e.g. taxon cycles. Evolutionary cycling was intensely studied in small …
There is still considerable debate about which mechanisms drive the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem function (BEF). Although most scientists agree on the existence of two underlying mechanisms, complementarity and selection, …
Many empirical food webs contain multiple resources, which can lead to the emergence of sub-communities—partitions—in a food web that are weakly connected with each other. These partitions interact and affect the complete food web. However, the fact …
Ecological communities are often characterised by many species occupying the same trophic level and competing over a small number of vital resources. The mechanisms maintaining high biodiversity in such systems are still poorly understood. Here, we …
The analysis of small recurrent substructures, so called network motifs, has become a standard tool of complex network science to unveil the design principles underlying the structure of empirical networks. In many natural systems network nodes are …
The theory of resource competition in spatially extended systems with resources and biomass fluxes is far from trivial. Here, we analyze the competition between two phytoplankton species for light and a nutrient in a weakly mixed water column. We …