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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
Biologists use mathematical functions to model, understand and predict nature. For most biological processes, however, the exact analytical form is not known. This is also true for one of the most basic life processes: the uptake of food or …
Population cycles that persist in time and are synchronized over space pervade ecological systems, but their underlying causes remain a long-standing enigma. Here we examine the synchronization of complex population oscillations in networks of model communities and in natural systems. In the proposed spatial model, each local patch sustains a three-level trophic system composed of interacting predators, consumers and vegetation. Populations oscillate regularly and periodically in phase, but with irregular and chaotic peaks together in abundance—twin realistic features that are not found in standard ecological models...