mathematical model

Global trade will accelerate plant invasions in emerging economies under climate change

Trade plays a key role in the spread of alien species and has arguably contributed to the recent enormous acceleration of biological invasions, thus homogenizing biotas worldwide. Combining data on 60‐year trends of bilateral trade, as well as on …

Enhanced Moran effect by spatial variation in environmental autocorrelation

Spatial correlations in environmental stochasticity can synchronize populations over wide areas, a phenomenon known as the Moran effect. The Moran effect has been confirmed in field, laboratory and theoretical investigations. Little is known, …

Depth of the biomass maximum affects the rules of resource competition in a water column

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 …

Sanctions as honest signals–the evolution of pool punishment by public sanctioning institutions

In many species, mutual cooperation is stabilized by forms of policing and peer punishment: if cheaters are punished, there is a strong selective pressure to cooperate. Most human societies have complemented, and sometimes even replaced, such peer …

The risk of marine bioinvasion caused by global shipping

The rate of biological invasions has strongly increased during the last decades, mostly due to the accelerated spread of species by increasing global trade and transport. Here, we combine the network of global cargo ship movements with port environmental conditions and biogeography to quantify the probability of new primary invasions through the release of ballast water...

A graphical theory of competition on spatial resource gradients

Resource competition is a fundamental interaction in natural communities. However, little remains known about competition in spatial environments where organisms are able to regulate resource distributions. Here, we analyse the competition of two …

Cycles, phase synchronization, and entrainment in single-species phytoplankton populations

Complex dynamics, such as population cycles, can arise when the individual members of a population become synchronized. However, it is an open question how readily and through which mechanisms synchronization-driven cycles can occur in unstructured …

Zipf’s law in the popularity distribution of chess openings

We perform a quantitative analysis of extensive chess databases and show that the frequencies of opening moves are distributed according to a power law with an exponent that increases linearly with the game depth, whereas the pooled distribution of …

Wave mediated synchronization of nonuniform oscillatory media

We characterize the spatiotemporal evolution of a photosensitive Belousov-Zhabotinsky medium that is made up of coupled oscillatory cells with randomly distributed frequencies. The medium evolves from an initial state of multiple wave sources to a …

Structural kinetic modeling of metabolic networks

To develop and investigate detailed mathematical models of metabolic processes is one of the primary challenges in systems biology. However, despite considerable advance in the topological analysis of metabolic networks, kinetic modeling is still …